Beauty And The Beast

Chapter 4

Isla POV

I have to live with it every day. Even when I try to speak up, it haunts me. It's been a week since I got ejected from the exhibition, and I haven't heard from him. Neither have I set my eyes on him.

In a way, I still struggle with the fact that my fate was locked up with a man I have barely known all my life.

Was it even fate, or was it a curse?

I rolled to the other side of the bed. I felt more than discomfort. My eyes went to the ceiling. I counted each square as if it was somehow going to help me.

Not long after, I jolted up and walked slowly in my robe into my tiny kitchen.

Everything that is happening to me currently isn't anything I would have believed if someone had told me.

I sat at the kitchen island, gulping down the warm milk in my hand. My eyes scanned the whole room. My phone, sitting close to me, lit up. My eyes slowly went to it. I picked it up slowly and casually.

"Who's this?" I murmured under my breath.

The number was unknown. No name, no hint of who was on the other end. I stared at it for a moment longer than I should have before setting it face down on the counter.

It rang again.

I exhaled and picked it up.

"Hello?"

Silence. Then a breath. Soft and deliberate, like whoever it was had been waiting.

"Miss Rose." The voice was low, feminine, unhurried. "I've been looking for you for some time now."

A chill moved up the back of my neck. "I think you have the wrong number."

"I don't." A pause. "My name is Astrid. Luna Astrid. And what is coming for you, Isla, is something no one around you can prepare you for. Not even him."

I set the glass of milk down. My hand wasn't steady anymore.

"How do you know my name?"

"The same way I know about the dreams." Her voice dropped lower. "The ones where you see things you shouldn't. Where the symbols make sense before your waking mind can catch up."

My throat tightened. I hadn't told anyone about the dreams. Not my best friend, not my therapist back when I still had one, not a single soul. They had been mine alone.

"What do you want?" I said carefully.

"To warn you." She paused slightly. "And to help you, if you'll let me."

I pushed off the counter and moved toward the window. Outside, the city was still doing what it always did.

I blinked.

I stepped back from the window.

"Miss Rose—"

"Where are you?" I cut in.

"Closer than you think." Her tone didn't shift. "Meet me. There's a café on Vellum Street. The one with the blue awning. Tomorrow morning, nine o'clock."

"I don't know you."

"No," she agreed. "But you know the symbol you painted. The one that started all of this." Another pause, and this time it stretched long enough to make my skin pull tight. "You didn't invent it, Isla. You remembered it."

The call dropped.

I stood in the middle of my kitchen with the dead phone pressed against my palm, the milk cold now, the city noise louder.

Maybe I was still asleep. Maybe the ceiling squares hadn't worked and I was still lying there, counting, dreaming.

But my hands were shaking, and in my experience, dreams didn't do that.

I set the phone down and stared at it.

Tomorrow. Nine o'clock.

I already knew I was going to go.

Sleep didn't find me that night.

I lay there watching the ceiling again, except this time I wasn't counting squares. I was thinking about a woman whose voice I didn't know, a symbol I had painted without knowing why, and a man with silver eyes I hadn't seen in a week but couldn't seem to stop thinking about.

That last part bothered me more than I wanted to admit.

I turned onto my side and pulled the blanket up to my chin. The apartment was quiet in the way that felt too loud. The refrigerator humming. A pipe somewhere in the wall. The distant sound of a siren rising and fading like it had somewhere more important to be.

I closed my eyes.

The dream came anyway.

It was the forest again.

Dark trees stretching so high their tops disappeared into a sky that wasn't quite black and wasn't quite purple. The ground beneath my bare feet was cold and damp, covered in something soft I didn't look down to identify.

I knew this place. I had been here before, in the way you know somewhere you've never actually stood.

And then the symbol appeared.

Carved into the bark of the largest tree, glowing faintly at its edges like something alive beneath the surface. I reached out without deciding to. My fingertips grazed the grooves and the forest shifted, contracted, pulled tight around me like a breath being held.

A voice came from somewhere behind the trees.

Not Luna Astrid's voice.

A man's. Old and worn, like something spoken through years of grief.

"You were never meant to be found. But you were never meant to stay hidden either."

I spun around. Nothing but trees and dark and that soft ground beneath my feet.

"They're coming for what runs in your blood, little one. Be careful who you let close."

"Who are you?" I called out. My voice came back flat, swallowed by the trees.

Nothing answered.

But the symbol behind me burned brighter, and the forest open with a sound like the world splitting at a seam, and I woke up gasping with my hand pressed flat against my chest.

4:47 a.m.

I sat up and didn't bother lying back down.

By the time morning came, I had already showered, dressed, and talked myself in and out of going to meet Luna Astrid no less than four times.

I went anyway.

---

Vellum Street was narrow and quiet at that hour, the kind of street that existed between places rather than being one itself. The café with the blue awning was exactly where she said it would be. Small. The smell of coffee reaching me even before I pushed the door open.

I scanned the room.

She was already there.

A woman seated at the far corner table, facing the door like she had been waiting for me. She looked older than her voice had suggested — silver-haired, sharp-eyed, wrapped in a dark coat that seemed too heavy for the season. There was something about the way she sat. Still. Deliberate. Like someone who had long since stopped wasting movement on things that didn't matter.

Her eyes found mine immediately.

She gestured to the chair across from her.

I crossed the room and sat down without speaking. A cup of tea was already waiting on my side of the table. I didn't touch it.

"You came," she said.

"You knew I would."

The corners of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile. "Yes."

I folded my hands on the table and looked at her directly. "Who are you? And how do you know anything about me?"

"I told you my name."

"Names don't mean anything without context."

She studied me for a moment. "You're sharper than they give you credit for." She wrapped both hands around her own cup. "I am what some would call a seer. I have moved through the edges of the Lycan world for longer than I care to count. And your name, Isla Rose, has appeared in things I've read long before you were born."

The word landed on the table between us like something with weight.

Lycan.

I had heard it once before. From him. In a moment I was still trying to fit into the shape of reality.

"You know about Alaric," I said.

"I know about all of it." She didn't blink. "I know what he is. I know what you are. And I know that the two of you being bound together is not an accident, no matter how much it may feel like one."

"What am I?" The question came out quieter than I intended.

She held my gaze. "Something old. Something they have been looking for." She leaned forward slightly. "The symbol you painted, Isla. Where did you first see it?"

"I didn't." I shook my head. "It came out of nowhere. I was working on a piece and my hand just—" I stopped. It sounded absurd out loud. "It just appeared."

"Because it's in you," she said simply. "Buried deep, but there. It belongs to a bloodline that most believe was extinguished generations ago." She paused. "They were wrong."

I sat very still.

"My father," I said slowly.

Something shifted in her expression. Careful. Measured.

"Your father," she confirmed, "was not who you believed him to be."

The tea in front of me had stopped steaming. I stared at it without seeing it. The dream was pressing at the back of my mind, the old voice threading through the trees.

**Be careful who you let close**

"Is Alaric dangerous to me?" I asked.

Luna Astrid was quiet for a long moment.

"Alaric Voss would burn his entire empire to the ground before he let anything touch you." She said it without warmth, without sentiment, the way you state something that simply is. "But danger, child, doesn't always come from the people who wish you harm."

She reached into her coat and set something on the table between us.

A small card. Black, with the same symbol from my painting pressed into it in silver.

"When you are ready to know the rest," she said, "you will find me."

She rose from her seat before I could speak, buttoned her coat in two efficient movements, and walked out of the café without looking back.

I sat alone at the corner table with a cold cup of tea and a card I was afraid to pick up.

I picked it up anyway.

The silver symbol caught the light. My thumb traced its edge and that familiar pull moved through my chest, deep and low, the same one I felt the first time I stood close enough to Alaric to breathe the same air.

I closed my fist around it.

I tucked the card into my pocket and stood.

Whatever was coming, I wasn't going to figure it out sitting still.