Beloved Beast

Chapter Thirty-Two

            What is blue to you?

            It is the weeping of the downhearted and the hopeless; it is a tranquility belonging to the sea, and a breezeless sky.

            Hopeless. Downhearted.

            Their ocean-like eyes were replete with both as they gazed at her in a synchrony of alarm. Mouths agape with arrested breaths.

            Her mother had gone painfully rigid and unnaturally pale. Esme stood frozen just beyond her mother's shoulder, having receded a few paces, her eyes wide and fixed exclusively on her battered face. Elsa pressed her fingers to her lips, her rheumy gaze lurching back and forth between Esme and their mother as if willing them to say something.

            How could she temper the panic in the enormous blue staring back at her? How to put into words what had happened? What she suspected? What she feared?

            "Oh, Elle." Elsa muttered, unable to smother a whimper, her expression rife with horror.

            With their focus rapt on her bruises, they had yet to realize that she could see them as clearly as they could see her.

            How did she go about explaining the impossible without them thinking the worst? She had been racking her brain for answers; pouring over every possibility. The events surrounding her vision were an enigma, and were just as complicated as the feelings that plagued her heart. The harsh, feminine voice in her head just before the burning in her eyes – she didn't think it a mere coincidence just minutes after departing Rossetti Keep. Don had sent her away abruptly for a reason, and she strongly believed that reason, or person, had everything to do with her functioning eyes.

            She was fortunate enough to have escaped the villagers' attentions. Too preoccupied in feeding their curiosities, they hadn't seen her face. A plight she was more than happy to avoid. But now she was faced with the challenge of explaining everything to her family, and was unsure how to move forward, how to convey the unthinkable sensibly.

            "What has that monster done to you?" her mother's gentle lilt broke with concentrated pain, her eyes pushing and pulling at all the bruises that were visible.

            Elle's heart lurched, and she parted her mouth to express plainly that it was all a terrible misunderstanding, but before she could utter a word, the door behind her flew open. She stiffened as a gust of cold air swept across her vertebrae, announcing her father.

            The room fell eerily quiet.

            Her sisters slid vacillating glances from her, to their father.

            Her mother visibly swallowed, her hands twisting in the wool covering her midriff.

            Gleaning their shared looks of alarm, her father shuffled around to face her, saying with a frown, "Daughter?"

            Elle held her breath as she turned to greet her father, gripping the lapels of her cloak as a way to anchor her quaking hands.

            When their eyes met, she was amazed to find that his were anything but blue, in fact, there was no light color to be found in the deep irises that coasted over her features with mounting alarm. They were dark, and full of shadows.

            Her father went uncannily still. His chest blooming with an enraged breath as his expression turned a mottled shade of red. "I'll kill him."

            "It's not what you think," Elle hastened to say, "He didn't –"

            "Elle?" her mother's incredulous inflection drew everyone's attention, and Elle's in a way that was unequivocally direct, supporting the thought that had dubiously taken shape behind the iridescent sheen of her eyes. The blue there glazed over with astonishment and disbelief.