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His threat to my father might be very real, but any one he makes to me screams hollow.
His nostrils flare. He doesn’t like me calling him out on his bluff. “Watch yourself, Beauty, or you are going to know why they call me The Beast.”
There it is—that nickname.
“Why do you call me that?”
His gaze dips down to my mouth for a mere flash, almost too fast to notice, but my body heats in that millisecond before his gaze meets mine again. “Do you know what your name means, Callista?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“It’s Greek for ‘most beautiful.’ Your parents named you well.”
With that, he jerks out of my hold easily and storms off around the corner of the house, disappearing before I even have a chance to process his words.
He knows Greek?
The Beast is not at all what I expected when I came up here, based upon the warnings I’ve received, not at all who or what I thought he would be, and the longer I’m here, the deeper the mystery becomes.
I stare up at the house, towering three stories above me.
Maybe there are answers in there because I sure as hell am not finding them out here, and I’m not getting anywhere trying to talk to him.
More like talk at him.
I pause and listen for his retreating footsteps, but the only sounds that reach me are the breeze blowing through the trees and the occasional chirp of birds.
He vanished into the forest like a wraith, a ghost.
No one was ever supposed to unravel the mystery of The Beast, but I don’t have anything else to do here, so I might as well try to figure out what the fuck is going on with Weston Barker.
It might be the only way I survive this, the only way I survive him and the tense push and pull that only seems to grow between us.
Chapter Five
CALLISTA
In the light of a new day, I’m more convinced than ever that nothing is as it seems when it comes to The Beast.
The entire morning has melted away with me drifting from room to room, examining the architecture, the furniture, opening drawers and cupboards, trying to find anything that might shed light on the enigmatic man.
But after hours, I have yet to find a single photograph or anything personal.
No pictures with his sister, the Governor of Montana.
None with his living extended family, the numerous cousins who are front and center in Helena and state politics.
Not even a snapshot with his father, who rumor has it ran the Barkers before his death.
Yet everything is shockingly beautiful—in that deadly alarming way that warns a person looking to stay on their toes, to keep an eye over their shoulder.
And here, something is almost always looking back.
The heads of various animals mounted on the walls I saw in the upstairs hallway were only the tip of the iceberg. They fill almost every room—the way I’d always imagined The Beast would have the heads of his human victims mounted before I met him.
No doubt the man is a killer.
Of these animals? Of humans?
