Or would he tell me, once more, that he loved me?
The mask choked me with the smell of newsprint. I tore it off and hurried toward the balcony door. Nothing mattered but luring him away from these warm, tempting bodies.
He’d come for me, not them.
The man in the wolf mask cocked his head, dark eyes watching as I hurried across the dance floor. He paused for just a beat before changing his direction and following me. The doors to the balcony were still cracked from before, making the white drapes flutter. Men and women stood near the door talking, red glows to their cheeks, wineglasses in hand. I pushed my way into their midst and through the door.
The cold wrapped around my arms. I glanced back through the glass door at the candlelit ballroom, where a girl in a swan mask glided and laughed. Overhead, the stars and the moon shone as brightly as before, and I cursed them. Darkness was what I needed now. A place to hide.
The door opened again. The man in the wolf mask stepped onto the balcony. We might as well have been the only two at the party, alone outside under the stars, only a few feet of flagstone separating us.
I wouldn’t let it end like this.
I ran down the staircase into the garden, knowing that the dark boughs of the hedges were the perfect place for a murder, but also my only chance of drawing him away from the crowd and escaping. At the end of the garden was a gate that led into the back alley, and from there I could lose him in the streets.
The man in the mask started down the stairs after me.
The garden hedges behind Lucy’s house were as familiar to me as the basement hallways of King’s College. So many memories here: Lucy and I exploring every inch of this garden, chasing fairies, playing Catch the Huntsman. That was my one advantage—I knew the maze of hedges, and the Beast did not.
I darted behind the closest hedge wall. It had thinned with age, and I could peek between the branches to see the man approaching. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked back to make sure no one had followed us outside, then moved toward the hedges. I darted to the next row as snow soaked into my satin slippers. They’d be ruined. It hardly mattered. I just had to reach the back gate and pray I could climb over.
I froze and listened. The hedges were fuller here and blocked my view. He could be anywhere.
I took a deep breath and darted around the hedge wall, past another row until I reached the brick wall. The black gate loomed ahead. Just a few more paces . . .
A hand came out of the shadows and grabbed my wrist. I started to scream, but the man’s other hand was over my mouth in a flash. I felt his chest against my back, all rigid muscle. I looked up at the lights shining onto the balcony, only a few dozen paces away from us, but it might as well have been another world.
“Shh,” the man in the wolf mask whispered. “They’ll hear you. They’ll think this is a secret tryst and come to investigate.”
I nearly choked with shock. That voice, so tender and yet so deep. It wasn’t the Beast’s.
It wasn’t Edward’s, either.
My wrist went slack in his hand.
“Montgomery,” I breathed.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
TWENTY-ONE
THE MAN REACHED UP and pulled off his mask, blond hair falling over his broad shoulders, but I already knew what face I’d find. There was no mistaking the voice that belonged to a young man I’d known forever, a voice that brought back memories of our hands intertwined, his lips on mine, my fingers tangled in his blond hair.
My head wouldn’t let me believe it. Reason told me that he was just another hallucination, and yet my heart knew Montgomery was real.
The mask slipped from my hand into the snow.
His face had lost its sun-bronzed color, replaced by a few fading cuts. The angles of his features were sharper. He’d always been strong, but now he held himself differently: tenser, hardened. Seeing him again stirred those painful memories of that last night on the island, waiting in the dinghy as the compound burned in the distance. I still remember seeing the rope fall from his hands, the jolt from his boot as he shoved the dinghy away with no warning.
But I need you, I had yelled across the waves.
The island needs me more, he’d called back.
With those words, Montgomery had shipwrecked my heart.
The memory made my knees buckle, but he came forward and caught me in his arms before I felt into the snow. Still so quick. Still so strong.
Our eyes met.
Still so handsome.
He was so close that I could feel the beating of his heart through our clothing. “Christ, I missed you,” he said, his voice just a whisper as it grazed my lips. His tender words shook me from the sense that this was all a dream. All the pain of his betrayal rushed back like a reopened wound. I shoved hard against his shirt, stumbling away from him before he could kiss me.