When Rose had left her family to suffer the romantic attentions of a monster, she had imagined that the worst days of her life were ahead of her. The day after she spilled ink on The Beast’s book was to prove her right, but for very different reasons than those she had imagined. Her restless night had left her fatigued and emotion raged through her with the symptoms of an ague, wracking her body with shivers and sickness.

Rather than waking her with breakfast, as he usually did, The Beast simply left it on the dining room table, where she found it after giving up waiting and trekking wearily downstairs. It was cold, and the yolk in the egg was long-since hardened. After eating, a part of her wanted to find The Beast in the garden, but she could not imagine such a course of action ending happily. With nothing better to do, she returned to the project of cleaning the house. Apart from the old servants’ quarters, she had now completed her work downstairs, so she went upstairs to work through the guest bedrooms. She had no idea where The Beast slept, but she knew if she found it she would be closing the door and moving on. Thankfully, the first room she tried was clearly long disused.

Cleaning afforded Rose plenty of time to dwell on the events of the previous evening. It was clear The Beast hungered for her, but maybe it was simply the hunger of a predator rather than romantic desire. If that were the case then it would explain the lengths he went to restraining himself when it struck him. It must be awful, she thought, to be a being of good moral fibre afflicted with a hunger for flesh. No wonder he was so angry with her after she had taunted him while his curse was at its strongest. He had called her a little girl. Rose remembered her first meeting with The Beast, when he had noted so pointedly that he had expected her elder sister Marguerite. It made sense now: he had been hoping for lady to court, and instead he had been sent someone he saw as a mere child. Yet still he had taken her in, fed her, and taken it upon himself to teach her to read. Any company was better than none, she supposed. It hurt to imagine how lonely he was.

When had she begun to think of him like this?