He couldn’t remember how he had allowed such a dangerous situation to develop in the first place. He knew better. The wine must have made him careless.
With another giggle, she wriggled her arms out of the dress and let the top of it fall to her waist, exposing the most beautiful pink nipples he had ever seen, perched on breasts of such perfect size and proportions they would make a sculptor blush.
As he felt himself growing harder, the young maiden dropped her gaze downward to his trousers.
“I take it you approve, amore?”
Before he could even begin to process her referring to him in such an intimate manner, she reached out and touched his pants. Taking hold of his hardness, she caressed it gently as she pressed her bare breasts against his chest.
That’s when he felt it, the pain in his temples and the all-too-familiar burning in his core that heralded his turning.
Tavros panicked, taking her by the shoulders and gently pushing her away.
Looking at the unfamiliar surroundings, he saw no door. “I must go,” he said.
Instead, she lowered her dress and stepped out of it, naked. Dropping to her knees before him, she reached for his trousers, working to undo them. He felt the fire in his face, the ache in his shoulders and knew he would be unable to halt the process.
That’s the precise moment he smelled it in the air, the acrid odor that only he could detect.
Oh, no. Not now. Please, not now.
The maiden managed to free his throbbing manhood and took it in her hand, but at that moment he doubled over in pain as the bones and muscles of his upper body began to realign and his head felt like it was about to split wide open.
Seemingly unaware of his dilemma, she massaged his member as if it were the only thing that mattered. Despite the horrible pain of his turning, Tavros felt himself growing close to the point of release.
A searing headache instantly took hold as his face began to elongate and widen. He wanted to scream in agony but held it inside, afraid that someone would hear and burst in on them. Panicking, he pushed the woman away again, more firmly this time, watching her breasts sway as his vision blurred from the changing shape of his eyes.
His paramour tumbled backward to the ground, then looked up and saw the fur, the snout, the horns.
She screamed in fear, and Tavros could see enough to make out that her face was a twisted version of its former beauty. Revulsed, she covered her eyes with her hands to avoid the sight. The pain caused by the turning was nothing compared to the torment he felt in his heart as she fainted out of sheer terror.
He bent over her body, but at that moment his manhood erupted with a mind of its own, and he was powerless to—
Tavros sprung up in his bed of hay, surrounded by darkness. His hands flew to his face and he found it drenched in sweat but still decidedly human. It had only been a dream.
His orgasm, though, was quite real and continued, unabated, to its ultimate conclusion.
Shaken by what had occurred, Tavros changed his nightclothes and tried to sleep again. Instead, the remaining hours until daybreak were spent cursing the gods for creating him as a monster, thereby denying him any semblance of a normal life.
Worst of all, the dream was a painful reminder that Tavros would never know love.
Chapter 6
Antonia
After her dismal first meeting with her husband-to-be, Antonia grew determined to capture Giovanni’s attention any way she could. She thought a visit to Signor Donato’s shipyard would perhaps give her another opportunity to bond with her fiancé. Although it might seem forward on her part, she decided it was worth the risk; she had evidently insulted him and needed to find a way to set things right.
Careful consideration led her to choose a graceful silver dress with a high neckline and gathered sleeves. Piera helped set her hair with cascades of reddish-brown braids folding back up to the top and kept in place with a thin silver chain artfully draped around her head. Stopping by the kitchen, Antonia took a cloth and set fruit-topped tarts and sugary cookies in the middle, tying it up with a ribbon of royal blue silk.
After telling her mother she was going to visit Flora, Antonia stepped out onto the small street behind her house, walking along the labyrinth of alleyways and foot bridges through the heart of Venice. She heard church bells ringing as she crossed through plazas and over canals. Rounding a corner, she was almost flattened by several young boys playing. One of them, with twin stick “horns” protruding from a cloth over his head, was chasing the others, who yelled and fought him off with toy swords. Antonia knew the stories about the horned beast who roamed the city on dark nights, and she laughed at the children immersing themselves in the scary myth. In reality, it seemed the only people who had actually seen the “Beast of Venice” were drunks.
Upon arriving at the Donato shipyard, she entered a world like none she had ever seen. Giant naval ships stood in their various stages of completion, with hundreds of laborers sweating away at their construction. Her nostrils filled with the smells of pitch and lumber, and her ears were assaulted by loud hammering and shouting.
Signor Donato was in the midst of an animated conversation with a foreman when he spotted Antonia out of the corner of his eye and hurried to her side.
“Bella!” Signor Donato exclaimed. “What brings you to my shipyard? Come with me, let’s get you out of this mayhem.”
He ushered Antonia into a small building nearby. Inside were tables loaded with maps, diagrams of different shipping vessels, and volumes of books with Latin titles. Signor Donato offered her a silver plate piled high with shiny, dried dates.
“Here, you must try these. They just arrived yesterday from Madagascar.”
She took a small one and thanked the statesman before popping it into her mouth. As she bit into it, she looked over to see Giovanni enter from a side door and hurriedly swallowed.
“Well, this is unexpected,” Giovanni said as his eyes met Antonia’s. “What brings you here?”
Antonia used her gift as an excuse for her presence, knowing it would be considered unbecoming for a young woman to enter the shipyard at all, especially alone. “I wanted to bring you a little surprise. I hope that’s okay. We didn’t get a chance to talk much at the dinner party.”
“It’s fine,” Giovanni said, taking the cloth bundle and setting it on a desk without so much as a second glance or a thank you.
“What perfect timing,” Signor Donato boomed. “Giovanni, take our young Antonia to the Ponte Rialto. Signor Bempensante, the rope merchant, needs a payment.” Opening a nearby drawer, he produced a satchel and tossed it to Giovanni, who caught it deftly with one hand.
“Of course, Papà,” Giovanni replied. He turned to Antonia and wordlessly gestured for her to follow him.
Outside the office, Antonia looked at the men working around the skeleton of a large ship. One group carried long planks of wood while other men dragged lengths of thick rope behind. Loud hammering attracted her attention to a wooden building to the right of the ship’s giant frame, where blacksmiths were busy forging metal for the vessels.
Walking behind Giovanni, Antonia slowed to watch a soot-covered man sling a red-hot piece of iron onto an anvil and slam a sledgehammer down onto its surface, causing sparks to fly. The man looked up at Antonia, his hammer stopping in midair as their eyes met. Antonia again felt a shiver climb her spine, like she’d felt outside of the fabric shop days earlier.
She paused in the middle of the walkway, stunned and unable to move. The blacksmith slowly lowered the hammer, never breaking his stare. His broad chest was covered by a dirty shirt, but his two large, sweat-slickened arms were visible. Antonia had never seen arms that muscular.
The two stood in silence for what felt like an eternity to Antonia. She recognized the dark, tousled hair, the faint outline of a strong jaw, the intensity in those silver eyes—
“Antonia!” Giovanni’s voice jolted her back to reality. She looked away from the blacksmith
to her fiancé, who was quite a distance ahead of her by now.
“Let’s go, I haven’t time to waste,” Giovanni said.
She lowered her head and hurried towards him, never once looking back, despite every fiber of her being screaming for another glimpse. She knew, though, that if she looked back at the blacksmith she would be frozen to the spot again.
“Come along,” Giovanni beckoned, extending a hand towards her. Antonia reached out and he took her hand in his, only to tug her gently before letting go as he resumed walking.
During the half-hour trip to the Ponte Rialto market and back, the two of them barely spoke, and the conversation was stilted. Antonia never once thought about the fact that her flesh had come in contact with that of her husband-to-be for the very first time.
Instead, she thought only of the blacksmith.
Chapter 7
Tavros
The best of plans can go awry due to a simple twist of fate. Had Tavros never seen the young maiden that day at the fabric shop, his life would have gone on as usual, or at least as usual as life can be for a sometimes-beast. Instead, fate had intervened, as it did once again when the two of them locked eyes in the shipyard for what seemed like an eternity.
Now he’d seen her twice, and she had clearly seen him.
To Tavros, destiny was the only explanation. A young woman like that, obviously from an upper-class family, in a shipyard? There simply was no other way to account for her presence, other than fate. From that moment on, he felt drawn to her, compelled to catch a fleeting glimpse whenever he could.
He hadn’t shifted in months and was beginning to wonder if he’d gained a degree of control over his curse. Since he was a teen he had attempted to understand what caused the transformation, what chain of events led his body down that path, so he could find a way to stop it once it started.
All in vain, as once the change began it always progressed to its natural conclusion.
Tavros had no idea why he’d been chosen by the gods to be cursed in such a terrible manner. His father hadn’t been so afflicted, and the only information he had been able to collect about minotaurs consisted of stories from ancient times about King Minos on the island of Crete. The King lived hundreds of miles from Tavros’s home island of Thirio and they could not possibly have been genetically linked. Not to mention that a king would be many, many social classes above Tavros. Year after year, he endeavored to live with the curse, but the struggle was constant.
He had vague memories from his childhood, of the agony of changing into the beast as a mean man yelled at him, which only made matters worse. There were also recollections of another man who was nicer to him, but Tavros wasn’t certain whether these were people from his past or from his imagination.
He did remember his loving parents, and the blissful years of his early youth spent on Thirios.
The first time he could recall the change having an added air of danger was an incident in his tenth year. Tavros had been chased into an alley by two sailors, a younger one who was looking for money and an older one with something more devious in mind. When it became obvious Tavros had nothing to offer monetarily, he found himself restrained by the younger man as the older one worked to undo his pants.
In his state of sheer panic, the transformation had been blissfully brief. The physical torture was over just seconds after it began, but the abject fear Tavros saw in the eyes of the two men was something he could never banish from his mind. After they fled, screaming, his own hands told him what they had seen: a creature with the body of a boy, but the head of a bull. Scared out of his wits, he still had the sense to know he seek refuge before anyone else saw him.
He had spent the next twelve hours hiding in a grain storage room. He heard a group of men pass, obviously searching for him because the word “monster” was uttered. While the hours passed, he was constantly horrified as he explored his new countenance. The fur, the changes in facial structure, the giant shoulders, and even the horns were frightening enough. But the snout, in some ways the most animalistic feature of this new being he had become, was absolutely terrifying.
Though he had tried to stay awake, he eventually sobbed himself to sleep. In the morning he’d awakened with his own head again, along with a shirt that had been ripped to shreds by his rapid growth, and which served as evidence that this had not been a bizarre nightmare. Tavros had run home to tell his parents, and the family left town that very afternoon with only the belongings they could fit into their small donkey-pulled cart.
They had settled in a small village in the countryside of Thirios, where Tavros managed to stay out of trouble. Things would remain calm for years as he was fortunate enough to avoid changing into the beast in public. Then as a young man he left home, moving to the seaside town of Phaino to apprentice in the blacksmith trade.
Over the years he had grown accustomed to the transformation, though at the time he still had only a vague notion of what precipitated it. Fear, definitely, and anger. Unfortunately, sexual excitement also often started the process. Consequently, Tavros had smartly remained a virgin and had buried his libido in the toil and sweat of his chosen trade.
When he was in his mid-twenties, he finally grew tired of waiting for the day he would lose his virginity and hired a courtesan, as many young men did. The day he had anticipated and dreaded in equal parts turned out to be the worst day of Tavros’s life. In his excitement, he couldn’t suppress the turning, and the poor girl fled naked and screaming from the room before the act had even taken place.
On that occasion, his luck ran out. He was caught while hiding and knocked unconscious. When he awoke, he was shackled in a prison cell, although he had committed no crime, and his upper right arm burned with the freshly branded outline of the horned head of a bull. Less than a week later, Tavros found himself caged on a ship bound for London.
Only a drunken sailor’s sadistic behavior had made Tavros’s escape possible.
Chapter 8
Antonia
Antonia and Flora sat at a small table in the courtyard of Flora’s family’s well-appointed home, drinking tea and eating pastries in the late afternoon heat. Despite her father’s repeated admonitions over the years, Flora continued to toss small morsels to the pigeons.
“You can always tell by their eyes,” Flora said, perhaps trying to seem worldlier than her lack of experience would indicated. “It’s impossible for a man to hide his true feelings because his eyes will betray him.”
Antonia thought about Giovanni’s eyes and knew she’d yet to see anything there that resembled love. Ambivalence for certain, and perhaps even resentment and irritation, but not even the faintest spark of attraction.
“I think he doesn’t find me pretty. Maybe I’m not woman enough to his liking.”
Flora lowered her voice. “Or maybe he finds no women at all to his liking.”
Swatting her friend playfully on the forearm, Antonia had already begun to wonder if the rumors she and her friend had heard for years about Giovanni favoring male company might be right. His petulant behavior in her presence had certainly indicated he was not concerned at all about leaving her with a good impression of him. Throughout their second meeting, during the walk to the Rialto Bridge and back, Giovanni had again been aloof and seemingly uninterested in his future bride. Antonia couldn’t help but wonder if her marriage would be just as passionless and boring as that walk had been.
Deep down inside, she knew that would not be enough.
She wanted more. She wanted a love for the ages, one in which neither of them could imagine being without the other, where every day together was a new miracle.
Giovanni was quite handsome, and his family very important, but he had yet to do something in her presence—anything at all—that would make her heart beat faster. Antonia wanted to feel her pulse race, but her future husband just made her feel anxious.
She sighed in frustration. Was she being unrealistic? Perhaps she was asking for too much. Shouldn’t G
iovanni’s good looks and wealth be sufficient? Regardless, Antonia couldn’t shake the sense of dread that her storybook marriage might not be all she’d dreamed it would.
The blacksmith, though—now there was a man who quickened her pulse, with those huge arms and mesmerizing silver eyes that spoke volumes. They were filled with longing, regret, and pain. Compared to the emotions visible contained in those orbs, Giovanni’s eyes were nothing more than spheres of Murano glass—pretty to look at but revealing nothing.
“Your mind is in the clouds again,” Flora said, tapping lightly on the top of her friend’s head.
Antonia was unaware how lost she’d been in thoughts of the mysterious shipyard blacksmith. When she came back to the present, she realized the sun would soon be dipping below the horizon.
“The sun is leaving us,” Antonia said. “I must hurry home. My father will be angry that I’m out so late.”
The two girls hugged goodbye and Antonia walked out into the warm, humid early evening air. She smiled as she passed a group of children playing games around the bronze statue of Doge Leonardo Loredan in Campiello Zorzi while a winged lion rested eternally at his feet.
Antonia had just turned down a deserted alley that she used as a shortcut to her family’s palazzo when she heard footsteps behind her. She turned to see if someone was following but saw nothing except the empty alleyway. She resumed walking, but once again heard footsteps. She began to feel nervous as she stopped again to look back, calling out, “Is anyone there?”
There wasn’t a sound. She stood still for a moment, listening to the sudden eerie quiet. The air was thick as the last light of day rapidly faded. The only sounds that could be heard were the faint strains of music from a church.
But Antonia knew she had heard something. Something or someone, much closer.
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