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@j-a-penrose Thank you so much for doing this! It’s much appreciated. 🙂

This is a little thing from a scene that will happen in my WIP Beautiful Murder (which I talked about last week). I don’t know if I’ll use this piece exactly, since I’m not there yet, but it is kind of what’s going to happen. It is a little more than 500 words, but I hope that’s okay.

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Kieran froze as he turned around the corner of Patrick’s house, his heart pounding as he realized he had nearly been caught. If someone saw him and reported him…if Isabelle found out who he really was, their best-laid plans would all go to waste, and their best chance at success would be gone. The door had just shut with a soft click, but he knew Patrick would have gotten home long before now. He heard no noises from inside, but waited a moment more just in case.

He carefully slid along the side of the building until he reached the window just before the door, and turned his head to look inside. At first, he saw nothing but a shaft of moonlight streaking the room from a window on another side of the building. But then a figure moved, stumbling into the light. He instantly recognized the short burliness of Patrick, but what was he doing, acting as if he were drunk?

Another person came into view then, and it took him a moment to believe his eyes were seeing truly. Surely Isabelle would not associate herself with commoners like Patrick, and especially not ones that were plotting against her family.

But no. That was her hair, burning brightly in the darkness, set on fire by the moonlight. Those were her fingers, the same ones that had played such a beautiful storm just a short time before, that had left him breathless with wonder. As she raised her arm, pointing at the other window and speaking words he couldn’t hear, the light illuminated the scars he had caught a brief glimpse of just yesterday, the ones he hadn’t had a chance to ask her about yet.

And they were definitely her eyes, the grey storms he had found himself caught in on so many occasions. They were the eyes he had seen dim with tears, bright with laughter, and fathomless with secrets.

But they held none of those things now. Now, they held Patrick’s gaze with a maliciousness Kieran had never seen in her, glinting in the moonlight as the strongest man he knew fell to the floor, grasping the skirt of her dress and pleading with her.

It was her mouth, the one that had smiled for him so many times, that now smiled again. But gone was the laughter and the joy that had moved it before. Now it smiled cruelly, somehow still beautiful in the cold fear it unexplainably instilled in him.

As Isabelle brought her other hand forward and the moonlight glinted off the blade she held, Kieran realized with horror what she was about to do. But he couldn’t move, the shock holding him in place. All he could do was watch as Isabelle, the one he had placed so much hope in, destroyed that hope with one swift cut, one that he felt as keenly in his heart as Patrick felt in his body.

Patrick fell to the floor once more, and as Isabelle placed a single rose on his chest, Kieran knew that the woman he thought he knew was no more than a shadow, a beautiful dream that held no reality.