Page 74 of The Beast
The inside was?—
I stopped walking.
Brock stopped beside me without comment and let me look, which was considerate of him because looking was the only thing I had the capacity for.
A great hall, two stories, a staircase that split and curved up both sides like an embrace. A chandelier throwing light across stone floors. Oil paintings the size of barn doors looking down from the walls with the stern authority of people who had owned things and expected that to continue. The smell of beeswax and something older underneath it—old wood, old stone.
It was extraordinary.
It was also, apparently, where Brock's family lived.
I thought about a horse ranch in Valentine, Texas. About seven brothers scattered. About a man who'd grown up in the hard, dry country and had come to Charleston for the first time yesterday and was now standing in the entry hall of a mansion that bore his name.
I looked at his face.
He was looking at the paintings with an expression I recognized—too much, arriving too fast, with no preparation.
I took his hand.
He looked down at it. Then at me. Something in him settled, slightly.
A man appeared—older, precise, in the kind of clothing that managed to be both formal and entirely unobtrusive. He had the face of someone who had been managing complicated households for a while and had made peace with all of it.
"Mr. Dane," he said to Brock. "I'm Teddy. I've been asked to show you to your suite." A slight pause, calibrated to just the right weight of acknowledgment. "Miss Donovan. Welcome. I'm very sorry for what you've been through."
He said it the way a person said something true. The plain fact of it, offered and not expanded upon. I was grateful for that.
"Thank you," I said.
He led us up the right side of the curved staircase, down a corridor that was wide enough to drive a small car through, past doors and side tables with flowers on them. Teddy stopped at a door near the end and opened it.
"Your brother is in the suite next door," he said to Brock. "He said to tell you he'll be available when he returns."
Brock nodded once.
"There are clothes in the wardrobe," Teddy said, looking at me now with the same careful neutrality. "Various sizes. Please take anything you need. Is there anything else I can bring you?"
"No," I said. "Thank you. Truly."
He nodded and went. Brock and I stood in the doorway of the suite and looked at it.
It was not a room. It was a suite in the way that word meant when it was used by people who had the square footage to justify it—a sitting area, a bedroom beyond, tall windows overlooking the grounds, evening light coming through in long gold bars across a floor that had actual rugs on it, the kind that had probably been made by hand in countries I'd never visited. A fireplace. Fresh flowers. The bathroom door ajar showing marble and the gleam of fixtures.
"This is yours," I said. Not quite a question.
"Apparently," he said, in the tone of a man who was still working out the implications of that.
He picked me up.
Not dramatically—no sweeping gesture, no announcement. He simply bent and got an arm under my knees and one behind my back and lifted me. I let out a breath that had some surprise in it and wrapped my arms around his neck.
"I can walk," I said.
"I know," he said. He carried me through the sitting room and into the bedroom and set me down at the foot of the enormous bed with the gentleness of a man who understood he was handling something that had been through a great deal.
The bathroom had a shower the size of my studio bathroom twice over. Brock reached in and turned the water on and then turned to me and helped me out of my clothes—methodically, carefully, the way he'd done everything today except the things that had required the opposite of methodical. He folded what was salvageable and set aside what wasn't without comment.
I looked at myself in the mirror while the shower heated.
