The four guards fell in around me as I left the stable, following in Dain's wake. It was weird to have them in a phalanx around me, but better than getting knifed, for sure.

I attempted to make my way back to my suite while contemplating Dain. I honestly had no idea what to think of him. Even if the anger and cruelty was a defense mechanism, it was still anger and cruelty, and I didn't enjoy it one bit. But sidestepping and treating him like an unruly puppy instead of a terrifying Beast seemed to be working to knock him off-kilter enough to act outside of his usual patterns, responding to what was actually happening rather than a century's patterns.

The deal we'd made that first day turned over in my mind as I finally found a familiar-looking hallway and turned down it with relief, the words clear in my memory. Sit with me. Dine next to me. Walk by my side. Do these things and I will strive to unlearn the lessons of my childhood and the century since for you. They hadn't struck me as strange at the time, while I'd been full of righteous anger. But the more I considered them, the stranger they got. Dain knew how to make deals. The man was fae, and more than a century old. This was his world.

He'd asked for companionship, and then he'd made an open-ended promise to me. The lessons of his childhood and of his life thus far were far more than how to move his body or whether he could use his wing-hands as hands. Dain had promised to... become someone else. For me. He'd promised to learn how to take down his defenses so that he could be with me.

I nodded to my guards, went into my room, and dropped down into one of the chairs at the breakfast table where he hadn't left skulls. I'd asked him who he was, and he'd told me: Dain Sundamar, the crown prince of Stag Court, the moon-called Beast of Phazikai, my fae soulmate. None of those were the answers I had wanted, but they were answers, nevertheless. A man, a prince, a Beast. My soulmate, someone intended for me, appointed by the gods.

It didn't really matter whether those gods were real or not. Dain believed in them, and he believed that we were meant for each other. He believed it enough to make me a promise like that, for the fragile hope that I would choose affection instead of opposition. For someone who called himself a monster with such ease and believed it to his bones, to say something like that...