Chapter Thirteen: The Weight of a Name - Fifteen Nights with the Beast for the Ruby Rose

The happiness from the dream did not vanish when Isla stepped out of her chamber, though she tried very hard to fold it neatly away before she reached the corridor.

It felt dangerous to carry such lightness through Blackwood Manor. The house was built for solemn steps, for lowered voices, for the careful measurement of rules and hours. Yet as the maid bowed and withdrew, leaving Isla alone in the southern passage, the memory of golden light still clung to her thoughts like warmth from a fire she had only just left. She remembered the pressure of the prince’s hand over his heart. She remembered the way the gravel had whispered beneath their feet in the moonlit garden. Most of all, she remembered the name that had risen to her lips without her knowing how it had come there.

Fitzherbert.

She did not say it aloud. Even in the quiet passage, some instinct warned her that the walls listened too closely for such a word to be dropped carelessly into the air. A name was not merely a sound in a house like this. It was a key, and she did not yet know which door it opened.

As she walked toward the central landing, she found herself looking at the manor with double vision. Where the dark wainscoting met the pale stone, she saw the brighter hall of her sleep layered beneath the shadow. When she passed the portrait gallery, she slowed her steps despite his old command not to linger there. The painted faces watched her from their heavy frames—severe, silent, burdened by years—and yet she knew now how they had looked when youth and candlelight had softened them.

Then she reached the head of the great staircase.

She stopped with one hand on the carved banister.

It was here that he had descended in the dream, dressed in court velvet touched with silver thread, his dark hair brushing his shoulders, his face whole and arrestingly handsome before ruin had laid a hand upon him. For one suspended breath, the memory was so clear that she almost expected to see him on the lower steps again as a man.

Instead, the hall below lay empty, lit only by the pale grey wash of morning through the tall narrow windows and the steady gold of the sconces.

Isla drew a slow breath, steadied her face into composure, and went down to breakfast.

When she entered the breakfast room at eight, the dream collided at once with waking truth.

The beast stood near the tall window overlooking the garden, his back partly turned to the door. There was no court velvet here, no easy grace untouched by grief. He looked vast and dark in his severe black coat, the heavy fall of his hair shadowing his broad shoulders, the dark fur along his jaw and throat unmistakable against the pale morning light. One powerful hand rested on the stone frame of the window; the other hung at his side, tipped with the quiet threat of claws.

For one breathless instant, the contrast between the prince in her dream and the creature before her was so sharp that Isla halted on the threshold.

He turned at once.

His amber eyes found hers—and the shock went through her all over again.

They were the exact same eyes.

Not merely similar. Not a faint resemblance preserved through magic. They held the very same stillness, the same guarded depth, the same way of looking at her as though she were a sentence he had read ten times and still did not wholly trust. The face around those eyes had been reshaped into terror and shadow, the brow heavier, the jaw harsher, the beauty buried beneath beastliness, yet the soul looking out from behind them had not changed by a single degree.

“You are staring,” he said.

His voice was rougher than it had been beneath the dream-moon, deeper, shaped by stone and solitude rather than courtly ease, yet her heart recognized the cadence of it immediately.

“I beg your pardon,” she said quickly, stepping further into the room.

“And now you are apologizing.” He moved from the window toward the table, his steps silent despite his size. “We are regressing.”

Despite the rapid beat of her heart, the corner of her mouth lifted. “Good morning.”

He stopped with one hand resting on the back of his chair and looked at her more closely. The morning light fell clearly across her face, and whatever he saw there made his gaze sharpen.

“You are in an unusual temper,” he said.

“Am I?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps I slept well.”

“People who sleep well in this house look relieved,” he replied dryly. “You look as though you have stolen something.”

Heat rose so swiftly to her cheeks that she had to look down at her plate as she took her seat.

He did not sit immediately. He watched her for a beat longer, his head tilting slightly in that silent, perceptive way she had learned to fear whenever she wished to conceal a thought from him. Then he took his place across from her, and the servants poured the tea, set down warm bread and late figs, and withdrew without a sound.

For several minutes, Isla kept her attention safely upon her teacup. Yet every time he moved—the precise, controlled way he lifted his knife, the slight inclination of his head when he listened to the wind outside, the princely stillness of his shoulders—she saw the man from the dream moving inside the frame of the beast.

It did not make him less frightening. If anything, it made him more heartbreaking. To see a cage was one thing; to have met the prisoner who lived inside it was another.

“Did the piano tire you?” he asked at length.

She glanced up. “No.”

“You are quieter than you were last night.”

“Last night you told me I was thinking too much. Perhaps I am practicing thinking less.”

“If you were thinking less,” he said, “you would not be looking at your tea as though it had offended your family.”

A small laugh escaped her before she could stop it.

The sound made him pause with his cup halfway to the table. The amber in his eyes caught the morning light.

“There,” he said softly. “Again.”

“What?”

“You laugh more easily this morning.”

She met his gaze then, and the warmth in her chest refused to be entirely governed. “Does that displease you?”

“No,” he said after a moment. “It makes me suspicious.”

“You are suspicious of everything.”

“With good reason.”

“Even happiness?”

The word slipped out too plainly.

The room went very still.

In the dream, he had touched his forehead to hers and said, You look happy. And she had answered, I am.

Now, in the pale daylight of the breakfast room, the beast looked at her as though she had spoken in a language no longer permitted within these walls.

“Is that what this is?” he asked quietly.

She realized her mistake at once and tried to retreat from it. “I only meant that my father has been growing stronger each day, and the storm did not ruin the garden, and—”

“Isla.”

The single word stopped her.

It was spoken in the exact tone the prince had used on the moonlit terrace.

Her hands tightened in her lap beneath the table. “Yes?”

“What happened in the night?”

She could not tell him. Some deep, unspoken certainty warned her that if she told him she had seen his former face—if she told him she knew his name and had danced with the memory of what he once was—the fragile ease they had built over the piano keys would shatter beneath his pride and his fear. He had hated her looking at the portraits in the gallery. He had turned cold with fury on the fourth night when she had asked if he had been born like this. How much more would he hate knowing she had looked upon him uncursed in her sleep and found him beautiful?

“I only dreamed,” she said softly.

His posture stiffened by the smallest fraction.

“Of what?”

She looked down at the white tablecloth. “Of the garden. And the moon.”

That much was true.

“Nothing else?”

The intensity in his voice made her lift her eyes. There was no anger in his face, not yet, but there was a strange, taut vigilance—as if dreams in Blackwood Manor were not harmless things, as if sleep itself had doors that ought to remain locked.

“Of music,” she added quietly. “And the house as it might have been when it was full of light.”

For a long, stretched moment, he said nothing.

His gaze searched hers so thoroughly that she felt stripped of every defense. She thought surely he would see the name sitting just behind her eyes. She thought he would demand it from her the way he had demanded her promise at the gate. Instead, she saw a shadow of old, private sorrow pass across his features, followed by a careful, deliberate closing of whatever had nearly opened between them.

“Dreams in this house are rarely generous,” he said, his voice lower now. “Do not trust them too readily.”

“This one was not cruel.”

“Cruel things do not always arrive looking cruel.”

A faint chill brushed the back of her neck, though she did not yet understand why. She thought of the prince touching her cheek by the fountain, of his voice telling her to remember and be happy. Could something so gentle truly belong to the curse? Or had she somehow stepped across a boundary in sleep and found the part of him the house had locked away?

“Did you ever dream of the house as it was?” she asked carefully.

He looked away toward the window, where the white birds sat in silent rows along the wet stone wall. “I do not need to dream of what I remember.”

The quiet bitterness in the answer made her chest ache. She wanted, with sudden and foolish urgency, to reach across the table and touch his hand as she had done in sleep. She wanted to tell him that the beast sitting across from her was not the ruin of the prince she had seen, that the same steadiness lived in both of them, and that waking had not disappointed her.

Instead, she folded her hands more tightly together. “When we played the piano last night,” she said, choosing safer ground, “you did not seem to be remembering only sad things.”

His eyes shifted back to her. “I was occupied with surviving your sense of rhythm.”

The familiar dryness rescued them both.

Isla smiled, though her eyes felt strangely bright. “My rhythm improved.”

“Your rhythm surrendered. There is a difference.”

“And yet you said it was acceptable.”

“I was tired.”

“You never admit to being tired.”

“Which should tell you how terrible the beginning of the lesson was.”

She laughed softly, and she saw the tension in his shoulders ease—not completely, never completely, but enough that the shadow of the dream receded a little between them.

They finished the meal with fewer words, though the silence no longer felt heavy. Outside, the morning mist was lifting from the gravel paths, leaving the box hedges dark and shining. A pale shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds and touched the edge of the glass, turning the ruby roses nearest the terrace into deep, burning garnet.

When the clock in the hall struck the half-hour after nine, the beast rose from the table.

Isla looked up in surprise. Usually they remained until ten, when the rose was brought.

“Come,” he said.

“It is not ten yet.”

“I am aware of the hour.” He paused beside her chair. “Yesterday I told you that if the weather cleared, the upper south terrace would be open again. You said that interested you.”

Her breath caught slightly. “It does.”

“Then walk with me until the hour strikes.”

She rose at once.

They left the breakfast room together, passing through the long southern corridor where the tall windows stood unshuttered to the washed morning sky. Walking beside him in full daylight felt different from walking beside him at night. Candlelight was kind to secrets; it softened edges and allowed shadows to blend into one another. Morning light spared nothing. It showed the heavy sweep of fur along his cheek, the unnatural height and breadth of him, the sharp curve of the ears half-hidden in his loose black hair, the worn places in the stone floor where years of solitary pacing had smoothed the flags.

And yet, as they stepped out onto the upper south terrace, Isla felt none of the instinct to shrink back that had governed her first days here.

The air was crisp and cool, smelling of wet stone, pear leaves, and the rich, dark perfume of the roses below. From the balustrade, the whole southern sweep of the garden lay visible. It was the very terrace where she had danced with him at the end of her dream—where the moon had hung vast and silver above the clouds and he had held her hand against his chest.

Isla walked to the stone railing and rested her hands upon it. The stone was cold beneath her palms.

The beast came to stand beside her, leaving a careful step of space between them.

“It is different by day,” she said quietly.

“Less forgiving,” he replied.

“No,” she said, looking out over the crimson beds where beads of rainwater still caught the light. “Only clearer.”

He turned his head to look at her. “You prefer the moonlight.”

“The moonlight made it look like magic,” she said honestly. “The morning makes it look alive.”

He did not answer at once. The wind moved across the terrace, lifting a strand of her hair and stirring the dark folds of his cloak. Below them, near the central fountain, two of the white birds glided down from the wall and settled beside the basin, their feathers gleaming like freshly fallen snow.

“You looked at the staircase this morning,” he said suddenly.

Isla stilled.

“When you came down from your chamber,” he continued, his voice even and low, “you stopped at the top of the stairs. Why?”

She kept her gaze fixed on the garden below so he would not see the sudden rush of colour in her face. “I was only looking at the hall.”

“You have seen the hall seven mornings before this one.”

“You watch everything.”

“I told you I have eyes.” He took half a step nearer the balustrade, though still he did not touch her. “What were you looking for?”

You, she thought. I was looking to see how much of the dream remained in the stone.

Aloud, she said carefully, “I was thinking of how the house must have looked when people came down those stairs without fear.”

Silence followed her words—so long and so quiet that she heard the drip of water from the eaves above them.

“No one has come down those stairs without fear in a very long time,” he said.

She turned her head then and looked up at him fully. “I did. This morning.”

The beast went utterly motionless.

The wind tugged his dark hair across his brow. In the pale sunlight, the amber of his eyes burned so brightly that it seemed to hold all the warmth the morning sky lacked. She saw the muscles in his jaw tighten, as if her words had struck him somewhere unguarded and he did not know whether to defend against the blow or accept it.

“You should not say such things to me,” he said, and there was a roughness in his voice that had nothing to do with anger.

“Why? Because you dislike false comfort?”

“Because I dislike hope more.”

The honesty of that nearly undid her.

“Why should absence of fear be hope?” she asked softly. “We have spoken for eight nights. You kept watch at my door through a storm. You taught me music when I played terribly. Would it not be stranger if I were still trembling every time you stood beside me?”

“It would be wiser,” he said.

“You said yourself that people speak too warmly of sense.”

A faint, unwilling shadow of a smile touched his mouth, though his eyes remained grave. “You have an inconvenient memory for my own words.”

“Only when they are useful to me.”

“They were not meant to be used against me.”

“Then you should choose them more carefully.”

He looked back out over the garden, though the rigid tension in his posture had softened slightly. “Myfather reaches the halfway point of his cure today.”

The shift in subject was deliberate, and she allowed it, though her heart beat faster at the reminder.

“Yes,” she said. “The eighth rose.”

“He continues to mend?”

“More each day. Yesterday he complained of boredom twice and told me my mending was crooked.”

“A remarkable recovery.”

“I thought so.” She paused, her fingers tightening slightly on the cold stone of the railing. “My sisters have begun to notice the change in him as well. And in me.”

His gaze returned to her, sharper now. “In you?”

“They think it strange that I return each morning without looking as though I have spent the night in a dungeon.”

“Perhaps I should tie you to a chair again before ten so you may return with a more convincing expression.”

She let out a startled laugh. “Do not dare.”

“It would satisfy your family.”

“Nothing satisfies my family for long.” Her smile faded a little as she looked toward the dark line of Blackwood Ridge beyond the garden walls. “Lavinia watches the roses too closely. And Beatrice asks questions she already knows half the answers to.”

“Do they know the terms of the bargain?”

“Only that I must remain here each night and bring the rose at dawn. Father has forbidden them to interfere.”

“Fathers forbid many things,” the beast said quietly. “As I recall, yours forbade you to return after the first rose.”

“Yes.”

“And yet you are here.”

“Because I gave my word.”

He looked down at her for a long moment. “Is that still the only reason, Isla?”

The question fell between them like a stone dropped into deep water.

Around them, the garden seemed to hush. Even the wind faltered along the terrace wall. She thought of the dream—of the prince asking her under the moon, Do you understand me? and her own voice answering, Outside it, I think I am trying. She thought of the name Fitzherbert resting unspoken against her tongue.

If she answered yes, it would be the first lie she had ever told him directly.

If she answered no, she would step across a line from which neither of them could return while seven nights of the bargain still remained.

Before she could speak, the great clock inside the manor began to strike ten.

One slow, deep stroke after another echoed out through the open doors of the terrace, measuring the hour between them like a warning from the house itself.

The beast did not press for his answer. Perhaps he saw enough of it in her silence.

“It is time,” he said quietly.

He led her down from the terrace by the exterior stone steps that curved directly into the central rose walk. It was the first time they had walked into the garden together by daylight since the morning he had relented at the locked gate in the rain. The pale gravel crunched softly beneath their boots. The ruby roses crowded thick and luminous along the arches, their petals dark as wine at the heart, untouched by the cold of the season.

At the centre of the walk, beside the bush where he had cut the second rose days ago, he stopped.

He did not summon a servant. He reached out with his own hand, selected a bloom that had just opened to its fullest strength—a rose so deep in colour that it seemed to hold the warmth of last night’s music and the secret light of her dream within its velvety folds—and severed the stem cleanly.

One of the thorns pressed against his thumb as he drew it back. He did not flinch, nor did it pierce the skin, yet Isla noticed how carefully he turned the stem so that the sharpest thorns lay beneath his own fingers rather than where hers would take hold.

He turned and held it out to her.

Up close in the clear morning light, looking up into the fierce, shadowed majesty of his face, Isla realized something that startled her more than the dream itself had done.

She did not miss the prince’s face while looking at this one.

The realization made her breath catch.

“Day eight is complete,” he said.

Half the bargain lay behind them now. Eight roses given. Seven nights remaining.

She reached out with both hands to take the flower. Because her thoughts were still half caught in the tenderness of the dream and the quiet truth of the terrace, her fingers brushed lightly against the back of his bare hand.

She did not pull away.

He went utterly still.

In the dream, his hand had been smooth and human. Here, it was larger, rougher, shadowed with dark hair and tipped with claws—yet the warmth beneath the skin was the very same. The same pulse beat there. The same restraint held him steady.

Slowly, carefully, he drew his hand back first, leaving the ruby rose in her grasp.

“You will return before sunset,” he said, and his voice sounded rougher than it had a moment before.

“Yes,” Isla whispered.

She turned toward the iron gate, which had already swung silently open at the end of the walk. Yet after three steps, his voice stopped her once more.

“Isla.”

She looked back over her shoulder.

He stood among the ruby roses in the pale morning sun, tall and solitary in his black coat, the white birds watching from the walls behind him. He looked like a lord of shadow and winter, and yet she knew now the boy who had hated sitting for portraits, the man who had loved music in candlelight, and the prince whose name she carried safely in her silence.

“Leave the dreams of this house behind you when you cross the gate,” he said quietly. “What lives in waking is difficult enough.”

She held the eighth rose close to her chest, its dark petals cool against her hands.

“I prefer what is awake,” she said softly, and saw his eyes widen by the smallest fraction before she turned away.

She stepped through the gates and walked out across Blackwood Ridge with the eighth rose held safe beneath her cloak, never guessing that before the sun went down again, the secret she carried would no longer belong to her and the manor alone.