Chapter Twelve: The Dream of the Prince - Fifteen Nights with the Beast for the Ruby Rose

That night, sleep came to Isla differently than it usually did. On other nights in the manor, she drifted into rest reluctantly, as though even sleep itself needed permission in that strange house. But this night, after the lesson at the piano and the quiet, charged stillness that had settled between her and the beast, sleep reached for her softly and drew her under before she had time to resist it. The fire in her chamber had burned low. The candles had been put out one by one until only the hearth cast a faint amber glow against the walls. Outside, the manor lay quiet beneath the moon. Inside, the silence felt gentle rather than watchful. Isla lay on her back for a while, staring at the canopy above her, replaying small pieces of the evening without meaning to: the warmth of his hand over hers on the piano keys, the dry wit in his voice, the rare and fleeting ease that had passed between them. She told herself she was only tired. She told herself she was only thinking too much. Then sleep took her, and with it came a dream so vivid that it did not feel like dreaming at all.

In the dream, she was standing in the great hall of Blackwood Manor, though it was not the hall as she knew it in waking life. It was brighter, warmer, almost alive in some impossible way. Candles burned in every sconce and chandelier, but their light did not merely flicker against the walls; it seemed to fill the air itself, turning everything soft and golden. The marble floor shone like still water. Music drifted through the hall from nowhere she could see, gentle and distant, as though another room somewhere in the house had opened into memory. The portraits along the walls no longer looked severe and shadowed. Their faces seemed clearer, younger, their expressions less burdened by years and silence. Even the flowers in the vases seemed fresher, more vivid, as if the entire house had been restored to the fullness of a life it had once possessed and lost.

Isla looked down at herself and saw that she wore a gown she had never seen before. It was pale, but not white; it held the faintest blush of rose at the hems and sleeves, like dawn caught in silk. It moved around her as though made of mist and moonlight rather than fabric. Her hair had been left looser than usual, falling in soft waves down her back. She should have felt startled, or frightened, or lost. Instead she felt a strange quiet certainty, as though she belonged exactly where she stood, as though the house knew her and she knew it in return.

She heard footsteps on the staircase.

She turned.

A man was descending slowly from the upper landing, one hand resting lightly on the banister. He wore black, though not the severe black of mourning or shadow, but the rich, elegant black of velvet at court, touched at the collar and cuffs with silver thread. His hair was dark and long, brushing his shoulders as he moved. His face was strong and arrestingly handsome, with a noble brow, a straight nose, and the kind of mouth that looked as though it knew both command and restraint. His eyes, when they lifted and found hers, were the same deep amber she knew too well. That was when the shock went through her—not because he was a stranger, but because he was not. She knew those eyes. She knew the way they held stillness rather than haste, the way they seemed to look through silence as though silence were only another kind of speech. She knew him before he spoke.

“Isla,” he said.

His voice was the same.

Perhaps softer. Perhaps less rough. But unmistakably the same.

She stared at him, unable to move for a moment. Every thought in her seemed to scatter and then gather again around one impossible realization.

“Fitzherbert,” she whispered, though she did not know how she knew his name.

A faint, knowing expression touched his face, not quite a smile but something near it. “So I am called.”

He came down the last few steps and stopped before her. Without the monstrous form, without the shadow of fur and fang and unnatural strength, he was still no less commanding. If anything, there was something more dangerous in seeing him thus—in understanding at once that the beast she knew had not emerged from nothing, that within all that darkness there had once been, and perhaps still remained, a man born to beauty, to elegance, to ease. The thought made her heart beat harder than fear ever had.

“You are looking at me as though I have offended nature,” he said.

She let out a breath she had not known she was holding. “You are not as I expected.”

“That has been said before.”

She could not help the small, disbelieving smile that touched her mouth. “Not by me.”

“No?” he asked, tilting his head slightly. “Then what did you expect?”

She searched for an answer and found none that felt large enough. “I do not know,” she said at last. “Only not this.”

He regarded her steadily. “And what is this?”

She should have looked away. She should have remembered all the ways caution had once protected her. Instead, she let herself keep looking. “This,” she said softly, “is beautiful.”

The silence that followed deepened, but did not wound. Something passed through his expression then—surprise perhaps, or something more private and difficult than surprise. He did not dismiss her words with wit. He did not turn them aside. He only looked at her as though trying to decide whether she had truly said them.

“You say that as though it matters,” he said.

“It does,” she answered, and in the strange logic of dreams she knew at once that it was true. It mattered because she had seen the beast. It mattered because she knew what he carried in the waking world. It mattered because this face, this form, this princely stillness, did not erase what he was but revealed another sorrow beneath it.

He offered her his hand.

The gesture was simple. Courtly. Unforced.

She took it.

His hand was warm, and the instant her fingers touched his, the hall around them seemed to shift. Not visibly, not in any crude magical transformation, but subtly, as though the house had exhaled in relief. The music grew clearer. The candlelight deepened. Somewhere above, a window opened to the night air, and the scent of roses moved through the hall like a living thing.

“Come,” he said.

He led her out through a pair of doors she had never seen open in waking life and into the gardens.

The sight that met her there was so beautiful that it nearly broke her heart.

The ruby roses stretched out in every direction under the full moon, but the moonlight had transformed them into something more than flowers. Their petals shimmered as though dusted with silver, each bloom holding light in its folds the way a jewel holds fire. The paths between them glowed pale and luminous, winding through the dark velvet of the beds like ribbons of pearl. The fountain at the centre of the garden shone like liquid glass. Every drop of water caught the moon and broke it into a thousand trembling stars. White birds moved silently through the branches overhead, their wings bright as silk, their bodies graceful and ghostlike against the deep blue-black of the sky. The breeze was soft, cool, touched with the heavy sweetness of the roses and something fresher beneath it—the clean scent of leaves, water, and night itself.

“This is impossible,” Isla breathed.

“It is only night,” Fitzherbert said.

She turned to him. “No. It is more than that.”

He looked at her with that same quiet steadiness. “Then perhaps you are seeing more than most.”

They walked slowly through the garden, hand in hand, and the dream gave everything the strange clarity of truth without explanation. The roses bent as though listening when they passed. The moon followed them through the branches. The gravel did not crunch beneath their feet but whispered softly, as if the garden itself wished not to disturb the moment. Isla had never felt so entirely within beauty before, nor so entirely seen by it. She looked at the roses and then at him and understood, in that irrational yet undeniable way dreams allow, that both belonged to the same enchantment.

“You are not frightening like this,” she said.

He glanced at her, almost amused. “Like this?”

She tightened her fingers slightly around his. “As you are now.”

“And as I am otherwise?”

She hesitated only a little. “Terrifying.”

He accepted that without surprise. “Good. Fear is useful.”

“Not always.”

“Often enough.”

She smiled, and this time he saw it. “You are very determined to remain difficult, even in dreams.”

“Do I seem less difficult here?”

She looked at him fully then, at the strong, beautiful face she had not known she longed to see until it stood before her beneath the moon. “No,” she said, and her voice softened. “Only easier to understand.”

Something changed in his eyes at that, something vulnerable enough that she felt it rather than saw it. He let go of her hand only to brush the back of his fingers against one of the glowing roses. The bloom trembled under his touch and shed silver light down into the darkness below.

“Do you understand me?” he asked.

“In this dream,” she said, “I think perhaps I do.”

“And outside it?”

She looked down at the path for a moment, at the pale ribbon of light winding through the garden. “Outside it, I think I am trying.”

He was quiet beside her. Then he said, “That may be more dangerous.”

She laughed very softly. “Everything with you seems dangerous.”

“That is because you are sensible enough to notice.”

They had reached the fountain. The stone edge glowed pale in the moonlight, smooth as bone. The water reflected them both with such clarity that Isla could see every fold of her gown, every strand of his dark hair, the exact line of his shoulders as he stood beside her. In the reflection they looked as though they belonged there—an impossible, enchanted pair lifted out of some half-remembered fairytale. She stared at the image and felt something within her shift with quiet force.

“I do not want to wake,” she said before she could stop herself.

The words hung between them.

When she looked up, he was watching her with a gravity so tender it made her chest ache. “You will,” he said.

She swallowed. “I know.”

“And then?”

She looked down into the fountain once more. The water shimmered. The moon broke itself softly across the surface. “Then I will remember.”

A strange sadness passed through his face. Not grief exactly, but recognition of grief’s possibility. He lifted one hand and touched her cheek.

The gesture was so gentle that it undid her at once.

His hand was warm. Real. The touch of him carried no urgency, no possession, only wonder and restraint and something she had no courage to name. She leaned into it before she knew she meant to, closing her eyes for one impossible second as the moonlight, the roses, the music, and the warmth of his hand all folded together into a single breathless feeling.

When she opened her eyes again, he had moved closer.

Not enough to startle her. Just enough that she could see the amber in his eyes deepen, the shadows of his lashes, the softness that had replaced the beast’s terrible watchfulness. He touched his forehead lightly to hers, and in that moment the whole world seemed to narrow to warmth, moonlight, and the unbearable sweetness of not being afraid.

“Isla,” he said quietly.

“Yes.”

“You look happy.”

The truth of it made tears sting unexpectedly at the corners of her eyes. “I am.”

He smiled then, and the sight of it was so beautiful that it hurt.

“Then I am glad,” he said.

The dream deepened after that, becoming less like sequence and more like feeling. They walked again, not speaking always, because speech was no longer necessary. Sometimes he led her through the rose paths and their shoulders brushed. Sometimes he told her pieces of things she did not fully understand—of music in winter, of candlelit galleries, of laughter that had once filled the house until midnight. Sometimes she told him small, ordinary things from Briar Hollow: the orchard in late summer, her mother’s lavender in the linen press, the way her father used to hum over account books without realizing it. In the dream, all of it mattered. Nothing was too little to be given, and nothing he gave seemed too small to keep.

At one point they found themselves upon a terrace high above the glowing garden, the full moon hanging so bright above them that the edges of the clouds shone silver. The wind lifted her hair and tugged softly at the skirts of her gown. He stood beside her with one hand resting on the stone balustrade, and she understood with a painful kind of joy that this was the same terrace from which he had once shown her the moonlit roses in waking life. But here he stood not as the beast who remembered too much, but as the prince who had not yet been lost.

“It is beautiful,” she said.

“Yes.”

She turned towards him. “You are beautiful.”

He looked down then, just for a moment, as though the words still struck him with disbelief. “You say such things very easily in dreams.”

“No,” she whispered. “Only truth comes easily here.”

He looked back at her, and whatever he saw in her face seemed to answer something he had long ago given up asking. He took her hand again and lifted it, not to kiss it with courtly flourish, but to hold it against his chest over his heart. She felt it beating there—steady, human, real.

Then he drew her into a dance.

There was no music at first that she could hear, only the soft rush of wind and the scent of roses and the silent gaze of the moon, yet somehow they moved as though music had been waiting in the air for them. His hand came to her waist with such natural gentleness that she did not tense. Her free hand rested against his shoulder. They turned slowly across the terrace, not with the precise formality of the lesson he had once given her, but with the ease of something already known. She did not stumble. He did not correct. They simply moved together as though the rhythm belonged to them both.

“You dance better in dreams,” he murmured.

“I have an excellent teacher.”

“That is true.”

She laughed, and he laughed with her, the sound low and warm and impossible to imagine vanishing from the world once heard.

They danced until the dream itself began to thin at the edges. Isla felt it before she understood it—the way the terrace light changed, the way the music seemed to grow more distant, the way his face, still so vivid before her, began to feel touched by the softness that comes just before waking. Panic brushed her, sudden and childish.

“No,” she whispered.

His expression changed at once. “What is it?”

“I am waking.”

He did not deny it.

The moonlight around them seemed to pale. The wind quieted. The roses below blurred into a soft glowing field. He took her face in both hands, his touch warm and certain.

“Then remember,” he said.

“I will.”

“And be happy.”

The words pierced her.

“How can I wake from this and be happy?”

For one fleeting instant, sorrow passed across his face, so deep and tender that she thought it might break her. Then he smiled again, and the smile was both his own and the beast’s, both prince and shadow, both what had been and what still remained.

“Because,” he said, “you saw me.”

The dream dissolved.

She woke at once, sitting half upright in her bed, the fading echo of moonlight still in her eyes. Morning had already entered the room, pale and soft across the coverlet. The fire had burned low in the hearth. Everything was ordinary again—the familiar chamber, the folded gown on the chair, the silver brush on the dressing table, the faint sounds of the house beyond her door. Yet for several breathless seconds she could not separate the dream from waking. Her heart was beating too quickly. Her cheek still remembered warmth. Her hand lifted of its own accord, as if expecting still to find his fingers around it.

She was smiling.

Not the careful, hidden smile she sometimes wore now when no one was looking. A real one. Bright, unguarded, almost luminous with its own astonishment.

Then the memory returned fully—not merely the beauty of the garden or the elegance of the prince, but the feeling of it all: the certainty, the softness, the tenderness she had not allowed herself even in waking thought. She pressed her hand to her mouth and let out a small breathless laugh at herself, half delighted and half disbelieving.

It had only been a dream.

And yet it had not felt like “only” anything.

She rose with unusual lightness. The morning itself seemed gentler. The water in the basin caught the light more sweetly. The air beyond the shutters smelled fresh. As she washed and dressed, she found herself replaying every detail she could remember, afraid some part of it might fade if she did not hold it closely enough. Fitzherbert on the staircase. Fitzherbert beneath the moon. Fitzherbert touching her cheek. Fitzherbert smiling as though the sight of her happiness mattered more to him than his own.

By the time the maid knocked at the door, Isla had arranged her face into composure again. But the happiness remained beneath it, bright and secret and impossible to fully conceal.

And as she prepared to go down to breakfast, only one thought rose above all the others, clear and dangerous and sweet:

she was going to see him again in beast form.