BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
as it’s never been told.
by
Cari Silverwood
For mature readers only
This is a dark erotic series and is written to be disturbing.
This book contains adult language and sexual situations only suitable for adult readers.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
Title page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
About Cari Silverwood
Acknowledgements & Copyright
Chapter 1
Wolfe
Words. Pain and words. I could hear but the meaning slipped away.
My body hurt. My head, my eyes, everywhere hurt.
For a while though, there’d been sun. Searing, beautiful light.
Words...
“No one can live with –”
“Bullet holes everywhere. Brain shot. Stomach, leg. Who is he?”
“A monster, I heard.”
“That’s a soldier tattoo.”
Monster. I heard that. Knew it was true. Words. I’d not heard words for a long time. Only cries and screams and whimpers.
There’d been blood, bodies, and starvation. Darkness. Loneliness. The animal in me growled and wanted. More females. More food. More blood.
Pain and blackness oozed past, leaving trails of words.
“He should be dead.”
“DNA result is back. He’s American. A soldier.”
“They want him flown out if he stabilizes.”
“If...”
“When... He’s alive. Shouldn’t be, but he is. Won’t see again though. Visual cortex is gone.”
The dark in my eyes fluttered and rocked.
Slowly, the dark took on color.
More days of pain, blurred days. They poked my skin and cut me, wrapped my mind in fluff. There were soundless days when they made me sleep.
Until one day...I could think again.
One day, I opened my eyes and...I saw.
The first word that came from the man leaning over me was, “Fuck.” The word was in English, a language I’d missed hearing.
I opened my mouth to speak and found nothing in my throat but dust, emptiness.
Even as he spoke into something in his hand, I knew I was missing parts of myself. Bad parts, good parts. When I shut my eyes, I could find some of them – a long way away, lost in the swaying, clinging fog. The fog clogged my tongue, my head, my thoughts.
Even my legs wouldn’t work.
Days and days and days.
The window glowed and darkened, shone and went black, rain spotted it. Then the glass dried until the next day of rain.
Days and more days, nights too.
The smell of antiseptic tainted the air, the rattle of wheels, the clatter of dishes and pans and things. I watched my fingers jerk upon the white bedsheet.
“You’ll be fine, Andy,” the male nurse said as he held me in place, where I sat on the edge of the hospital bed. “You’re home, you know? The USA. We’ll get you up and walking. It might take a while, but we’ll get you there, son.”
Son? I grunted my puzzlement. Andy? Was I an Andy? I didn’t think so. No, I was a Wolfe. There was another name too, but that one I’d forgotten. The men above the deep hole I’d lived in had called me Wolfe for so long the other name had drifted away.
“Move your lower leg. That’s it! You’re a damn miracle, Andy. Good man.”
It took me months to figure how to walk. Talking was harder, even if my thinking came good. The fog was there in my head, so maybe that was to blame? I took my pills and kept trying. One day I would run and talk, and all the lost bits in my head would come back.
My first word was a great one: “Wolfe.”
The doctor and nurses whooped and cheered. I didn’t smile. They didn’t understand that was my name even when I smacked my chest and said it.
Dumbasses. Kind dumbasses but still, dumbasses.
I was getting better and I’d figured out one of the missing bits. Females. Not that there weren’t female nurses but when I watched them go past, or change my bedding, or do all the other stuff nurses did, the beast in me barely stirred and never woke.
For the best. Definitely. The fog kept it quiet.
I took my pills and I smiled the day they transferred me to a bigger, more open place. This was somewhere I could see the sun every day. I could be outside, feel my skin warm, see the bees flit past.
I could open my arms and laugh at the sun. I could help rake the pungent soil and plant flowers, and no one cared that I didn’t speak well, or that once upon a time I’d killed everyone the men above had given me. Killed them, maybe done worse. My memories weren’t good, but I didn’t want them anyway.
I was done with that time...
I wanted the beast asleep, forever.
I was Wolfe and I was happy.
Until the day she came.
Kiara.
At first she was like a pretty bird that had landed in my garden. She was so elegant and sure of herself, even in the nurse’s uniform, yet unaware of the admiration of those around her.
I was kneeling in the dirt, gardening, that first day. Her ankles fascinated me, then her stockings as they flowed up her leg, the edge of her dress, the flash of thigh as the cloth moved. The swell of her breasts, the shape of her lips when she smiled.
Nothing new for a female, yet it was for me. She was.
Slowly things changed. Sometimes the days jumped. Half a week would go before I figured out I’d lost time.
Sometimes days crept like burned offerings across my tongue, my mind. When I saw her, beautiful images jarred into being. Visions of her. Objects. Moving scenes. When she was gone, I itched to set them on paper, but the little pens and pencils fell from my fingers.
If I was the sort of man who cried, I would’ve. Instead I cursed, quietly, to myself.
The fog blurred my world. I was lucky to figure out one plus two. I knew about math, about history, about logic, but by the time I settled on one thing, what I’d calculated would’ve slipped away from me.
I could never catch the tail of those thoughts well enough to draw, couldn’t command my fingers enough to focus. A shovel, sure. The difference escaped me. I guess I was just shit at art.
Leonardo da Vinci. I remembered him. He’d painted a woman. He’d have laughed at me.
So when the visions hit, I’d sit down and close my eyes and remember.
Close one eye, that is. My hurt one I could see with now. I had a patch over it. People didn’t need to know. Maybe Kiara had injected me with a bunch of health and that was why I got better.
Most of my visions of her were tame – the angle of her body as she turned, the play of shadows and light on her face, the sound of her laughter, the sound of my heart when she spoke.
In one, all I could hear was her breathing
. All I could see were her light brown eyes looking up at mine. That vision was the strangest. It disturbed me. Maybe because my hands would often be beside her neck, with the thumb stroking her skin.
Only, they didn’t seem to be my hands. They had blood on them.
* * * * *
Kim Phuong, Bangkok, Thailand
Kim was walking along the sidewalk in front of his favorite dumpling restaurant in Bangkok when the news was delivered. A man found almost dead in the jungle some months before had been the mythical one they called Monster – the crazy one who had inhabited the missile silo for many years and fed off the carcasses thrown to him by the equally mad Johannes.
So, he’d been real, not some made-up story.
Johannes had also joked that he’d eaten some of the women while they’d been alive, but Johannes had liked to make evil jokes. True or not, it didn’t matter anymore. Or not to Kim.
Over a drunken game of makruk, a man had admitted to shooting the monster. Then he’d seen the monster rescued.
Kim’s men knew better than to report a half-researched story. They’d tracked the monster’s path to hospital and then to the USA. He was alive if badly hurt, but where he’d gone in the US no one knew.
Yet.
The facts gave Kim several sleepless nights. What if Johannes had been correct? What if this monster possessed a strange form of mind control, even if it only worked on women? The now-deceased Johannes had promised him such powers.
Kim no longer wished to dabble in brain research. Johannes had been dirty and his honor the lowest of the gutter low. However, this information might be valuable to someone.
This idea gave Kim Phuong several more restless nights, while he decided who it would be best to deliver the information to. Though he couldn’t operate in the USA, there were several countries that did and could operate there. China for one. Russia for another.
Money was better than some fruitless chase after magical powers.
Finally, after much prayer, he decided who to bargain with.
Chapter 2
Kiara, Good Shepherd VA Rehabilitation Village.
The email came dressed as spam, just like they’d said. No doubt sent to a million other accounts so it didn’t alert the wrong people. The little symbol in the top right corner made me halt and not press delete. At least, not until I double-checked. There were five possible symbols and this was definitely one of them. A multipronged star with the top prongs filled in with black.
They wanted me.
Fuck. My heart did flip flops and I bit down on the side of my hand to let the pain overwhelm my panic.
It took me some minutes to calm down.
Sure enough, a little flash drive the size of a thumbnail was stuck under a railing at the park.
Encrypted, of course.
After that it was just a matter of applying for the job at the rehab center. I was accepted, though I was never sure if that was luck, skill, or some outside influence.
The first day, I felt as if I had a sign plastered on me. They’d know – know I was some sort of spy. So laughable. Logically, who would think of a nurse as a spy?
For the best, I told myself. This was a paltry request and no one would ever find out. My parents would be safe. We’d all be happy.
I prayed I was correct. If they ever asked me to assassinate the president, I’d have a cardiac arrest.
I didn’t know what the purpose of this was to be. Watch one patient and warn my handlers if or when anything changed?
It was such a strange command.
Andy Carruthers had a big file that told me enough to figure out most of his past. The rest came down from scuttlebutt and hearsay, which was usually rooted in the truth.
He was a marine who’d gone missing in Afghanistan after a firefight with some Taliban. Presumed dead, until he’d turned up thousands of miles away in Thailand, riddled with gunshot wounds. No one knew how he’d gotten there. Whatever investigations had been done to check that journey weren’t showing on his medical file. He’d had bullets or bullet fragments in his brain, stomach, arm, and both legs. No one had expected him to survive, but he had. No one expected him to walk or see again, but he had.
Now he was here, a quiet, unassuming, if large, shaggy-haired man, who hated getting his hair cut. He talked with difficulty and had obvious residual brain damage. The number of pills he was prescribed was daunting and required us to watch him for five minutes, mornings and evenings, to make sure he swallowed them.
Grand mal seizures that’d resisted therapy and unstable behavior linked to PTSD – a catch-all phrase that doctors loved – had been the reason for those pills.
He swallowed them amiably.
The village had a duck pond where he liked to garden. I couldn’t watch him much more than any other patient, but at lunch hour I made it my habit to go out there and eat.
Was he too a spy? Some valuable font of information from overseas espionage? Had he stolen Russian military secrets? I had a great imagination and for a few months he seemed more fascinating than the latest GRR Martin or The Princess Bride book I had with me. I’d observe him, the ducks, and the letters on the page in equal proportions.
Twu love. Death cannot stop true love. It was the best thing about The Princess Bride, even when read a hundred times over. I could read it and hear my favorite movie actors saying the words, every single time. Sometimes I’d shut my favorite book and instead I’d watch him.
“Hi, Andy.” Then I’d settle on the wooden bench with my sandwich and iced coffee.
“Hello, Kiara,” he’d reply in his slow monotone. Everyone called me that. It was too detached to be called nurse by men I’d come to know so well, yet somehow from him it was more personal.
Because he was my private project, I suppose.
I’d sit, eat my lunch and watch as his big hands wrapped around the small shovel and sank the blade into the earth. Those hands would tuck the seedlings into their home as carefully as a mother putting her children to bed. If he’d kissed the plants, I’d not have been surprised.
The scent of freshly turned loam and moisture-saturated air, as he watered the garden, became a comforting part of my routine. We reassured each other. I was doing my job, nursing, watching, keeping my parents back in Russia safe; he was doing his.
Though I really didn’t know what thoughts occupied him.
Every so often, he jolted me with this sharp, assessing look that made my toes curl in my regulation brown nurse shoes. Danger would blip up, all red and flashy, in my female sonar that registered bad men – as if I’d met him in a dark alley at night, alone, with my car keys dangling from my hand, my dress askew, and alcohol befuddling me.
My mouth would go dry, as if, fuck, he meant to pin me to a wall, yank down my underwear, and have his wicked way with me.
Scary yet titillating, crazy as hell, and the best imaginary fantasy ever, if only his brain wasn’t barely above vegetable status.
Getting turned on bothered me. So wrong.
Except, maybe inside there, he was still him? Maybe he was locked in there, his brain churning, even if his speech center wasn’t doing so well?
If that were true...
Fear would stir again, uncurling in my abdomen, reminding me that he was the subject of my observation. He was big and strong enough to do what he wanted with a woman. The other vets had convinced him to play a casual game of football once, until he’d accidentally flattened a couple of them and they’d sent him away.
Was my apprehension absurd? I had no clue. He was an enigma. No one at the center knew of my speculation about his past, or that a foreign country was very interested in him.
Other times, he exhibited the thousand yard stare veterans of war had made their own.
Perhaps he was thinking of evil he’d witnessed? Death, people blown apart, general carnage – it took its toll on such men. He was a soldier who’d been trained to kill. That must be the reason for my unease.
Apart from those
weird, infrequent frissons nothing much happened for months. I helped with his rehabilitation – physiotherapy for his legs, exercises for the one eye that still functioned, and other things. He still spoke little, but he overcame most of those problems. His other eye, the useless one that’d been cut, he kept under an eye patch. The sunken scar on his temple above that eye filled in with tissue as did a place where some shrapnel had entered his head. His dark hair grew longer, since he growled at the hairdresser. I showed him how to tie his wavy hair back with a cord so he didn’t drag it in the dirt when he leaned over.
I could barely tell where his injuries had been, if it wasn’t for the thin slash that swept over his eyelids. The man healed well.
Then a new doctor arrived to oversee the wards, Dr. Leroy Hass.
I was there when he came into Andy’s room. It’d been my turn to supervise the pills.
Dr. Hass was tall, lean, with crewcut gray hair that’d please a marine sergeant. He snapped out orders too – quietly, but I could hear the assertiveness.
“I see Mr. Carruthers hasn’t had a change in his medications for months?”
“No, sir.”
The sir was a natural with me. My father had drummed manners into all of his children, boy and girl alike. With my hand still wrapped about the first clear tub of pills, I waited.
“We need to do that. Reassess.” He glanced up. “No seizures for three months. Doses high enough to make a horse fall over?”
“The blood levels of the drugs and enzymes were –”
“I know. Even so. Sit on the bed, Andy.” He examined Andy thoroughly – stethoscope, ophthalmoscope, palpation of all the old wound sites as well as a visual inspection. Then he straightened and grimaced. On the mobile computer station, he reread the summarized records then shook his head.
“Andy, I’m going to have a series of new tests done. MRI, blood tests, and so on. It won’t hurt, but I want to be thorough.”
“Sure, doc.” Andy smiled and pulled on his T-shirt.
I thought nothing of this until the doctor beckoned me to follow him outside the room. The door shut pneumatically behind us.
“Nurse, I didn’t want to alarm Andy, but...” He flicked a finger at the screen. “None of this makes sense. If the MRI confirms what I saw, his injuries do not parallel those in his history. In which case, I’m having the DNA analysis repeated.”
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