Free Seven Kisses: A Beauty and the Beast Dark Romance by Giselle Renarde

window, which looked out on a sculpture garden.  The walls were painted hospital green and the floors were the same dark wooden slats she’d walked on when she’d arrived.
    Loindici Manor.
    Her mind was unbearably hazy. She couldn’t tell reality from fiction. She remembered talking to her father on the phone, then entering the premises. A town car pulled up and a girl ran out. “You’re Suzanne now.” She was taken inside and she went along with it because maybe she’d spot a celebrity or two. And then the men in scrubs, the ones who looked like those figures in the sculpture garden below her window, they’d drugged her and she’d had strange sexual dreams about a man, about a beast.
    Strange, strange fictions…
    Her bed looked as old as the mansion. It had a curved iron headboard, a firm mattress, taught white sheets.  As for her, she wore a white cotton shift with buttons on the cuffs and ribbons woven through the collarless front. Who’d dressed her in this? How long had she been drugged and dreaming?
    What day was it? She had concert tickets Thursday.
    Ooh… I need to pee. Where’s the bathroom?
    The large wooden door stood front and centre, and Gabrielle cast her legs over the side of the bed to go to it.  When she put weight on both feet, her legs collapsed beneath her. They felt like they were made of spaghetti.
    That’s weird.
    Gabrielle reached for the iron rail at the foot of the bed and tried to heave herself up. Easier said than done.  Her muscles seemed incapable of cooperating. She kept telling them to do this, do that, get up, walk to the door, but they wouldn’t. They couldn’t.
    What is wrong with me?
    Her most recent dream streamed to mind like a black-and-white movie: she’d thought the beast would kiss her, but instead he plunged a needle in her neck. 
    Had that really happened?
    No…
    Was that why her muscles didn’t work? Because her body was full of drugs?  Because she’d been bound in stirrups for days?
    No… impossible!   Things like that only happened in horror flicks or paperback novels. Not in real life, and certainly not to her.
    Letting her head fall onto the white sheet, Gabrielle moaned. “Owww…”
    What hurt? Just everything.  Her arms and legs and back and butt and head and down there and, god, she needed to pee!
    “Okay,” she said to herself. “I’m getting up. Hear that, legs? I’m getting up… NOW.” Her arms trembled as she heaved herself to her feet, but her legs didn’t hold. She fell flat on the bed. “Damn it.”
    Rolling on the stark white sheet, she gazed at the dark wooden door.  Where did it lead? Hopefully a bathroom. If only she could cross the room without falling flat on her face. What else was in this bedchamber, anyway?  A large writing desk with the drawers removed. A trash bin. A metal chair with a vinyl chair pad. Looked like it was from the 60s, like something from an asylum.
    I’m in an asylum.
    Gabrielle didn’t know whether to laugh or cry until an idea came to her. She reached for the chair, pulling it close to the bed.  Turning it away from herself, she used it as a walker and, step by step, made her way to the door. Placing her limp hand on the bronze knob, she turned, turned, turned…
    Locked.
    Maybe those dreams were real.  Maybe she was being held captive in this place.  Maybe the only way to escape was to make a run for it.
    Gabrielle’s heart raced. An bead of sweat broke at the small of her back.  Using the chair for support, she made her way across the room as quickly as her useless muscles would let her. Climbing onto the bed, she sat on her knees with both hands wrapped around the iron headboard.
    The window was old. Lead glass. The kind that opened up rather than out or to the side.  Oh god, could her weak arms handle this?  Only one way to find out: she slipped her fingers under the moon-shaped grips.
    “Three, two, one…”
    She tried pushing, but her body declined. The window didn’t budge. What