Beastly Desires

Chapter Fifty-Six

She stayed because she was not ready for death. She was not ready to leave this life so soon. She watched her friends and family walk through those gates and die. She watched them hanging from the castle walls with nooses around their necks, or lying on the floor with swords through their chest.  None of them made a sound. None of them heard their own cries of death. But she saw it. Death. It was cloaked in black. It's talons hissed across the stone at night. Its horns taunted her to step closer. And it's eyes. Its eyes burned with a feral sort of hunger. Her death belonged to the young lord who was foolish enough to kiss the devil. She had continued to serve him. Continued to live another day after another while the people around her slowly dwindled in number.

The castle became a lifeless place. Its gardens were overgrown and unkept. Its castle walls  unguarded. Bodies began to build up outside the gates and among the outer walls. Wolves and buzzards came to feast on their flesh until all was left were bones and even the ground eventually ate those up too.

The last of the servants aside from her and Niel- the Lords butler, decided then that living wasn't living at all and after three years of solitude from the outside world they met their ends by poison. Beatrice would never forget the day she found the three in the chapel behind the castle. They laid on top of one another like toppled books on the floor between two pews.

Yet she still remained. Niel fed her lies of hope. Hope that one day the young beast lord would break the curse and free us from our silent torment. Free us from the walls of this castle. She believed him up until Ayra. Her friend. Her only friend in years since that cursed day. They became acquainted quickly. Perhaps it was because they were the only females in the castle and the bond between them was natural and necessary. She saw how Ayra looked at Lord Sébastien. She found his beastly appearance alluring and his kindness welcoming after the death of her brother. Despite her initial feeling toward him, she came to desire the lord and Beatrice couldn't understand why. She couldn't understand why she was infatuated with the Lord who had so much blood on his hands all because he couldn't handle rejection.

But she wasn't going to interfere in the course of destiny even if it meant her dear friend would die. It was her turn to live life unbound and free.

Unfortunately, it did not end that way. Ayra did die but the curse still remained. It was not love the woman felt towards the lord but lust. A feeling Beatrice knew all too well. A feeling that led her towards the kitchen at night to the one person in the castle that felt the most real. She did not love Aarav, but they shared an intimacy that only two lonely people could share.

Now, as she sat in her small room reading the latest letter from Mister Moreau she began to hope again.