The music was a mistake.
I let it out. After days of that damned storm, after reading Kai's latest poisonous editorial in the Financial Times painting me as not just a beast but an incompetent steward of my own fortune, after watching Ruby's pale, determined face on the security feed as she found the door… I broke.
The piano is the only thing in this godforsaken wing that feels real. The keys are cool and solid under my fingers. The music that comes out is mine—not the performance, not the persona. It's the raw, unfiltered sewage of my soul. Grief for parents I failed. Fury at the uncle who took them. Guilt so thick I could swim in it.
And now, a new, terrifying strain of feeling: her.
Ruby. With her dirt-stained hands and clear eyes that look at a dying flower and see a patient. Who read my note in the margin and understood it was a cipher, not a kindness. Who took the artist's tools and immediately started drawing the one thing she shouldn't.
She is dismantling me. Brick by careful brick.
I play until my hands ache, until the sorrow morphs into a rage so pure it whiteouts my vision. The final chord is a crash, my fists coming down on the keys in a discordant roar of pain.
The sound that tears out of me then is inhuman. It's the sound of the boy I was, trapped in the ashes. It's the sound of the man I became, locked in this stone lie. It's ugly. It's weak. It's everything the Beast is not supposed to be.
I slump forward, forehead resting on the scarred wood of the piano, breathing in ragged gasps. The silence that rushes back in is suffocating.
And then, a new sound.
Not the house settling. Not the distant sea.
A soft, hesitant knock.
At the steel-reinforced door to my prison.
My head snaps up. Every muscle in my body coils into a spring of alarm. No one knocks. No one comes here. Mrs. MacLeod would use the intercom. The staff are forbidden.
There's only one person in this house brave enough, or foolish enough, to stand outside that door after hearing what she just heard.
Ruby.
Panic, sharp and cold, lances through me. She cannot be here. She cannot see this. The performance, the entire carefully constructed edifice of the Beast, it all crumbles if she sees the man behind it. Kai's plan relies on my monstrosity. My survival relies on her belief in it.
I stand so fast the piano bench screeches against the floor. I stride to the door, my heart hammering a brutal rhythm against my ribs. I don't open it. I stare at the monitor linked to the camera outside.
There she is.
She's still in that simple gray dress, her hair a tangled halo from the storm winds. Her face is pale, her eyes wide with fear… but not for herself. They're wide with a desperate, aching concern. For me.
And in her hands, cradled like a wounded bird, is the black orchid. The one I knew was dying. The one I used as a lesson in cruel botany.
She brought me a dying flower.
The absurdity of it, the sheer, staggering bravery of it, cracks something open inside my chest. It's not sentiment. It's a statement. I heard you break. And I brought you the thing you said was dying, so you would know you're not alone.
She knocks again, a little louder. "Hello?" Her voice is muffled by the steel, but I hear the tremor in it. "Are you… are you all right?"
I close my eyes. The urge to open the door is a physical ache. To let someone in. To let her in. To have one person in this world see me, just for a moment, as I am. Not the Beast. Not the victim. Not the avenger. Just Nicholas. Broken. Guilty. Terribly, dangerously fond of a girl with soil under her nails.
But it's a catastrophic impulse. Kai's eyes are everywhere. His pawns are in my house. Liam's friendly face flashes in my mind. If I show her this sanctuary, if I reveal the man, I paint a target on her back the size of Scotland. Kai doesn't just want to destroy me; he wants to prove my corruption is absolute. What better proof than me corrupting the innocent bride he "saved" for me?
Her safety depends on her fear of me. On her belief in the monster.
I have to send her away. I have to make her believe.
I open my eyes. My reflection in the dark monitor is a ghost—pale, strained, hair disheveled. I look like a man who has just lost a war with his own ghosts.
I reach for the intercom button, my finger hovering. I need to summon the voice. The bored, contemptuous, empty voice of the Beast.
But when I press the button and speak, the voice that comes out is none of those things. It's ragged. Quiet. Threadbare with a feeling I cannot name.
"Go back to your room, Ruby."
There's a sharp intake of breath from the other side of the door. She heard it. The crack in the armor.
"You're hurt," she says, and it's not a question. It's an accusation of the universe. "Let me help."
"You cannot help." The truth, raw and ugly. "No one can. Go back."
Silence. Then, the soft rustle of fabric. She's sliding down, sitting on the floor outside my door. I see it on the monitor. She's setting the orchid pot carefully beside her, drawing her knees up to her chest.
"Then I'll wait," she says, her voice small but impossibly firm. "Until you're not hurt. Or until you decide to open the door."
Stubborn. Reckless. Wonderful girl.
A flash of anger—at her, at the situation, at myself—ignites in my gut. It's the only fuel that can burn away this treacherous weakness.
"Do you have a death wish?" I snarl into the intercom, forcing the venom into my tone. "Do you understand the meaning of 'forbidden'? Of 'for your safety'? Or are you as simple as you are stubborn?"
I see her flinch on the screen. Good. Be afraid.
"I understand that someone is in pain," she fires back, her own voice gaining strength. "And I understand that leaving people in pain when you can do something is cruel. Are you cruel, Nicholas?"
She used my name. Not "Master." Not "Mr. Sterling." Nicholas. It's a slap and a caress all at once. No one has called me that in years.
It breaks me.
"You know nothing of cruelty!" The shout tears from my throat, echoing in the vaulted space of my studio. "You think a sad song is pain? This is a game, you foolish girl! A game with lives as pieces! Your life! Your sister's life! And you are knocking on the game board, asking the player if he has a headache!"
The words hang in the static between us. I've said too much.
She is silent for a long moment. When she speaks again, her voice is clear, cutting through the haze of my anger. "Then let me see the board. Let me understand the game. You gave me pencils. Give me this."
God, she's magnificent. Terrifyingly so. She isn't pleading. She's negotiating. She's meeting me as an equal in the only currency I seem to respect: blunt truth.
I look around my sanctuary—the grand piano, the shelves of books that are actually files on Kai's empire, the canvases where I paint not landscapes but network diagrams of his holdings. This is my command center. My war room. Letting her in is the ultimate security breach.
But she is already in. She has been since she looked at a dying orchid and saw a life to save.
My hand moves to the keypad. My fingers, which know the code as well as they know the scales on the piano, hesitate. This is the point of no return. Once she sees, there is no unseeing. Once she knows, she becomes a part of it. Complicit. Endangered.
I think of her on the security feed, tracing the clean number 7. She's already hunting for the truth. Wouldn't it be safer if the truth came from me? If I could control the narrative, even here?
It's a rationalization. A thin one.
I punch in the code. The biometric scanner glows green. With a heavy, hydraulic thunk, the locks disengage.
I take a deep, shuddering breath. I am about to show the beast's bride the man. And in doing so, I might be signing her death warrant, or my own.
I reach for the heavy handle and pull the steel door open.
The light from my studio spills out into the dark corridor, illuminating her.
She looks up, her face swimming with fear, courage, and a dawning, awe-struck wonder. Not at the room behind me. At me.
Her eyes sweep over me—taking in my disheveled state, the lack of a monster's visage, the unmistakable evidence of recent tears I didn't bother to wipe away. Her gaze holds no triumph. No horror. Just that devastating, gentle concern.
And in that moment, standing in the doorway between my lie and my truth, I feel more exposed, more vulnerable, than I ever have in my life.
The game has changed forever.
And I have no idea what the next move is.