Chapter Three The First Broken Promise - Fifteen Nights with the Beast for the Ruby Rose
By Hasnainhr
By the time Isla crossed back over Blackwood Ridge, the day had begun to dim towards afternoon.
The path through the woods no longer felt merely strange. It felt divided. Behind her lay the manor with its silent birds, its locked garden, its candlelit hall, and the beast who had spoken to her like a lord and sentenced her like a prisoner. Ahead lay Briar Hollow, her father’s sickbed, the faded familiarity of home, and three sisters who would not understand what she had done even if she spent all night explaining it.
Between those two worlds she walked with the ruby rose clasped in both hands.
Even wrapped in the fold of her cloak, it seemed to pulse with impossible life. The flower did not droop in the cold air. Its petals did not bruise. Its deep crimson colour remained lush and vivid, as if the rose had stolen warmth and light from some hidden season and would not surrender either willingly.
Several times on the journey home Isla touched the bloom just to be certain it was real.
Several times she felt tears rise, though whether from relief, dread, or exhaustion she could not have said.
When the village finally emerged through the grey veil of mist, it looked smaller than before. Briar Hollow had always seemed to her a place of narrow certainties, of known roads and knowable people, of habits repeated so long they had become part of the soil itself. Yet now, with the memory of the manor still sharp upon her skin, the village seemed frail. Ordinary. Helpless against the kind of darkness that existed beyond Blackwood Ridge.
She quickened her pace.
By the time she reached the house, her skirts were damp to the knee, her gloves stained with earth from the garden wall, and her whole body ached with the strain of fear delayed rather than spent.
She pushed through the front door without knocking and nearly startled one of the maids into dropping a basket of linens.
“Miss Isla!” the girl gasped. “You’re back.”
It was such a foolish thing to say that Isla almost laughed.
Instead she asked, “How is he?”
The maid’s face changed at once. “Much the same, miss. He slept, then woke, then asked for you twice.”
That was enough. Isla did not wait to hear more. She gathered her skirts and hurried upstairs, the ruby rose clutched to her chest like a burning heart.
The door to Grover’s chamber stood half open.
He was awake.
The moment he saw her, something in his whole face gave way.
Relief did not merely soften him—it broke over him so completely that for one terrible instant she feared the force of it might do him harm. He pushed himself upright against the pillows with a strength born of desperation rather than health, staring at her as though he did not trust his own eyes.
“Isla.”
She was at his bedside before he could say more.
“Father.”
He caught hold of her with both hands, weak though they were, as if he had to touch her to believe she was truly there. His fingers trembled against her shoulders. His breathing came too fast. And then, to her shock, he gave a broken sound that was half laugh and half sob and pulled her down into a fierce, trembling embrace.
She held him just as tightly.
For a long moment neither of them said anything. There was no room for speech in that first rush of reunion. Isla buried her face against his shoulder and felt the fragility of him beneath the blanket, the fever still too warm in his skin, the thinness of his frame, the effort with which he clung to her. He smelled of linen, candle wax, medicine, and home.
“You came back,” he whispered at last.
“I told you I would.”
He drew back only enough to look at her, his hands still framing her face as though afraid she might vanish if he let go. His eyes were bright with unshed tears. “You are safe.”
For one brief instant she did not know how to answer.
Safe was not the word she would have chosen. Alive, yes. Returned, yes. Unharmed in body, perhaps. But safe? She still felt the gaze of the beast on her. She still heard the birds screaming overhead. She still knew, with dreadful certainty, that she had promised to go back.
Yet she smiled because he needed it.
“I am safe enough.”
Grover’s gaze fell then to the rose in her hand.
For a moment he simply stared, and she saw wonder overtake even his pain. The bloom’s deep ruby petals seemed almost to darken the whole room around them, making the greyness beyond the window look poorer by comparison.
“You found it,” he said.
“Yes.”
“God help me,” he whispered. “It is real.”
Behind Isla, there came the faint sound of movement in the doorway.
She turned.
Lavinia, Beatrice, and Cecily stood there together, all three drawn by the news of her return and by the curious force that always drew the idle towards drama. Their faces were a study in contrasts: Lavinia wore disbelief tinged with affront, as though the world had violated good sense by allowing Isla to succeed; Beatrice looked too thoughtful to be comfortable, her sharp mind no doubt already working itself around implications she disliked; Cecily, pale and wide-eyed, stared not at Isla but at the ruby rose itself with naked fascination.
For one heartbeat no one spoke.
Then Lavinia said, “Well.”
The word held many things and none of them generous.
“You truly went,” Cecily breathed.
“Obviously,” said Beatrice quietly. “Unless she plucked that out of thin air.”
Isla had neither patience nor energy for them. She turned back to Grover. “We must prepare it at once.”
At that, even Lavinia came a little further into the room. “Prepare it?”
“The wise woman said the rose must be pressed fresh. Its essence is strongest before the day fades.”
Grover’s hand tightened round hers. “Do what is needed.”
The maids were sent for. A clean bowl, a glass vial, a small silver knife, and a pressing cloth were brought. None of the servants dared ask too many questions, but every one of them looked at the rose as though it were some holy and dangerous relic.
Isla did not let anyone else touch it.
With trembling care she stripped the petals one by one, gathering them into the bowl. Their scent rose richer with each touch, filling the room with an intoxicating sweetness unlike any rose she had ever known. Then, following the instructions as best she remembered them, she bruised them gently with the back of a spoon, wrapped them in the pressing cloth, and squeezed their dark essence into the waiting vial.
The liquid that emerged was not quite red and not quite gold. It shone like diluted garnet in the light.
Lavinia made a small sound of disgust. Cecily leaned closer. Beatrice said nothing at all.
Isla carried the vial to the bed.
Grover looked at it and then at her. “You are certain?”
“No,” she answered honestly. “But I am hopeful.”
Something like a smile passed over his worn face. “From you, that is nearly the same thing.”
She held the glass to his lips.
He drank.
For one terrible moment nothing happened.
Then his eyes shut and his face changed.
The transformation was not miraculous. He did not spring up whole. The fever did not vanish from him like smoke. But the dreadful strain in his breathing eased almost at once. The tightness in his brow loosened. The trembling in his fingers quieted. He drew one long breath—a full breath, deeper and freer than any she had heard from him in days—and let it out slowly.
The room remained so silent that everyone heard it.
Grover opened his eyes.
Some colour had returned to his face.
It was only a little. Too little for true recovery. Yet compared with what he had been that morning, it was astonishing.
“My chest...” he said softly, almost in wonder. “The pain is not gone, but—less. Much less.”
Isla’s breath caught.
“Do you feel different?”
“Yes.” He pushed himself slightly higher against the pillows and this time did not seem to spend all his strength in doing it. “Warmer. Clearer. As though I have surfaced from deep water.”
Tears sprang instantly to her eyes. “Then it works.”
Grover took her hand and pressed it to his lips. “You saved me.”
“No,” she said at once, shaking her head. “Not yet. It must be fifteen days.”
At that, the room shifted.
The joy remained, but now it stood beside dread rather than replacing it.
Grover looked at her more closely. “Fifteen days?”
“Yes.”
He still held her hand, but she felt the tension return to his fingers.
“What does that mean?”
The three sisters had drawn nearer now, close enough to hear every word. Lavinia’s expression sharpened. Beatrice went very still. Cecily folded her arms tightly, as though bracing herself against something she already disliked.
Isla looked down at the empty bowl of crushed petals, then back at her father.
“It means,” she said quietly, “that I must go back.”
“No.”
The word came from Grover at once, strong enough to silence everyone else.
His fingers tightened painfully around hers. “No. You have done enough.”
“It is not enough.”
“You said the rose was needed. You have brought it. You see already that it has done me good.”
“For today,” she replied, her voice trembling despite all effort to steady it. “Only for today. Mistress Hawthorne said the cure must continue without interruption for fifteen days. One rose each day. Fresh. If it stops, the healing stops.”
“I feel better now,” Grover said, with a little of his old stubbornness surfacing. “Look at me. I am sitting up. I can breathe. There is strength in me again.”
“Some strength,” said Beatrice softly from behind.
All eyes turned to her.
She lifted one shoulder. “Enough to speak. Perhaps enough to hope. Not enough to be careless.”
Lavinia looked sharply at her, perhaps irritated that she had chosen this moment to be sensible.
Grover ignored them all. His gaze remained on Isla. “I will not have you spending fifteen nights in that place.”
The force of feeling in him undid her more than anger might have done.
She sat carefully on the edge of the bed. “Father—”
“No.”
“Please listen.”
“I have listened enough. You went because I lay helpless. Now I tell you that I would rather die than see you chained to some creature’s whim.”
The room seemed to go hollow around the words.
Cecily gave a tiny frightened gasp. Lavinia looked away. Even Beatrice’s face changed.
Isla’s own heart clenched so sharply she had to pause before speaking.
“You would not rather die,” she said at last, very quietly, “if you saw what it would do to me.”
He looked at her then, really looked, and she saw how much it cost him to hear the truth in her tone.
“What did he ask of you?” he said.
There it was.
The question she had been trying not to answer.
She glanced towards her sisters. All three were listening with such fierce attention that the room seemed suddenly too small to contain them.
Grover saw the glance and understood it at once.
“Out,” he said.
Lavinia stiffened. “Father—”
“Out.”
This time there was enough of the old command in him to be obeyed. One by one the sisters withdrew, though none of them did so gracefully. Cecily went pale and hurried. Beatrice gave Isla one long unreadable look before turning away. Lavinia was last, and her expression held something darker than curiosity now.
Jealousy.
Not of the danger, of course. Never that. But of the intimacy of sacrifice. Of the terrible privilege of being the one most loved and most needed.
When the door shut, Isla let out a slow breath.
Grover still had not released her hand.
“What did he ask?”
So she told him.
Not everything. She did not speak of the first sight of the beast in all his terrible dark majesty, nor of the panic that had emptied her body of strength, nor of waking tied to a chair in a hall fit for kings. She could not bear to place those images in his mind. But she told him enough. Of the bargain. Of the fifteen days. Of returning before sunset. Of leaving at dawn with a fresh rose. Of his insistence that she remain there each night until the cure was complete.
Grover listened without interrupting.
The longer she spoke, the more the new colour in his face seemed to fade beneath another kind of strain altogether.
When she had finished, he looked as if he had aged years in the space of minutes.
“No,” he said again.
“Father—”
“No. I forbid it.”
His voice broke on the last word.
“It is too much. Too strange. Too dangerous. You know nothing of him.”
“I know enough.”
“Enough? You know he is monstrous. You know he keeps a locked garden and a cursed house. You know he bound you like a criminal.”
“And yet he gave me the rose.”
“He bought you with it.”
“Yes.” The word slipped out more harshly than she intended.
Grover went silent.
Tears filled her eyes at once. “I am sorry. I did not mean—”
“No,” he said hoarsely. “You did. And you are right.”
He turned his face away, looking towards the window. The late afternoon light was dying there, pale and uncertain beyond the rain-streaked panes.
“I should never have let you go.”
“You did not let me. I went.”
“You are my daughter.”
“And you are my father.”
His shoulders shuddered once. Whether from weakness or sorrow she could not tell.
At length he said, in a voice so low it scarcely seemed to belong to him, “Then let one day be enough.”
Hope is a cruel thing when it wears a loved one’s face.
For one weak, beautiful hour, it almost seemed possible.
Grover remained awake through most of the afternoon, which he had not done in many days. He drank broth willingly. He spoke more clearly than before. Once he even asked, with a trace of his old dry humour, whether the wise woman might be persuaded to send roses for the household in general, since they appeared to improve a man’s temper as well as his lungs.
Isla laughed, and in that moment she let herself believe.
She sat beside him with her hand over his and thought perhaps one rose had indeed done enough to turn the tide. Perhaps tomorrow he would be stronger still. Perhaps the beast’s bargain could be broken without consequence. Perhaps the cure, once begun, would continue its work unassisted.
At supper, Lavinia and Cecily whispered behind guarded hands. Beatrice alone remained mostly silent. Their jealousy had not vanished, but it had been joined now by something closer to unease. The ruby rose and its effect had made the world less comfortable for them. Magic was a charming thing in stories and an intolerable one in the house next door.
When evening drew near, Grover refused to let Isla rise.
“You are not going back tonight.”
“I promised.”
“You owe more to your father than to a beast.”
She held his gaze. “It is because I owe everything to my father that I must think beyond one evening.”
“I am telling you I feel better.”
“You do.”
“Then trust what you see.”
She nearly broke then. Nearly.
But what if the improvement lasted? What if this one omission changed nothing? What if fear was making her too obedient to a curse she scarcely understood?
In the end, love and hope and exhaustion conspired against good judgement.
She stayed.
By dawn the improvement had begun to fail.
Isla woke in the chair by Grover’s bed to the sound of him struggling for breath.
The room was dim and cold. The fire had burned low. Outside, morning had barely begun to grey the windows. But the little strength yesterday’s rose had restored was vanishing already. Grover lay twisted in the bedclothes, his face pale and damp, his chest heaving beneath the blankets. The cough had returned with renewed violence, and when Isla reached him, he was shaking.
“Father—”
He tried to answer but could not. Another fit seized him, harsh and deep enough to tear through his whole body. This time when the handkerchief came away, there was more blood than before.
Terror went through her like ice.
“No.”
She set him upright, gave water where she could, steadied him as best she might, but even as she did so the truth arrived in full, terrible clarity.
The wise woman had warned her.
The rose must be used for fifteen days without interruption.
Healing interrupted was healing undone.
Yesterday had not been victory. It had only been the beginning.
By the time the coughing fit passed, Grover looked weaker than he had even the day before, as though the brief improvement had only sharpened the cruelty of its loss.
He saw the understanding in her face.
And because he loved her, because he was her father before he was anything else, he closed his eyes and said the words that must have cost him more than illness itself.
“You must go.”
Tears spilled down her cheeks at once.
“I should have gone yesterday.”
“Yes.”
“I was a fool.”
“No.” He drew one ragged breath. “You were hopeful.”
That somehow made it worse.
She bent over him, her forehead against his hand, and for a few helpless moments she wept as she had not allowed herself to weep before. Then she rose, washed her face, put on her cloak with shaking fingers, and went.
The road to Blackwood Ridge seemed harsher that second morning.
Not because the woods had changed, though perhaps they had, but because she carried now not only dread but guilt. Every step felt late. Every turn in the path seemed to accuse her. The memory of the beast’s final warning followed her like another presence: Do not be late.
And she had been later than late.
She had broken her word.
By the time the manor came into view, the sky had brightened into a colourless morning. Mist clung to the lower grounds. The garden walls stood pale and forbidding beyond the dark line of trees.
The gate was shut.
This time it did not stand invitingly ajar. It remained closed, the iron dark with damp, the thorned vines twisted round it like something grown there to keep more than weather out.
Isla approached slowly, her heart hammering so violently she thought she might faint again before she had even crossed the threshold.
The birds were there.
Dozens of them lined the wall and branches as before, white and elegant and still. Their black eyes followed her. None screamed.
Yet.
“Please,” she whispered to no one and everyone.
She laid a hand on the gate.
It did not move.
Panic surged.
She pressed harder. Nothing.
Then, somewhere within the grounds, a voice rang out.
“Go away.”
It was his voice.
Not raised to its fullest strength, yet sharp enough to strike through stone and mist alike. It came from somewhere beyond the inner paths of the garden, and it carried anger like a drawn blade.
“Go back to your village.”
Isla froze.
A shape moved between the yew hedges and emerged onto the central path.
The beast.
He was darker than the morning, wrapped in black from shoulder to boot, his long hair loose around him, his face set in a fury that made his terrible beauty even more forbidding. The amber of his eyes seemed almost gold in the pale light. He did not hurry. He did not need to. Wrath moved with him as naturally as shadow.
When he came close enough that she could see the hard line of his mouth, he stopped on the other side of the gate.
“You broke your word,” he said.
There was no shouting in it now. That made it worse. The rage had gone colder.
“I know.”
“No.” His gaze cut into her. “You do not.”
“Please—”
“I waited.”
The words were low, and in them lay something that unsettled her more deeply than anger alone.
“I waited for sunset. I waited into darkness. I waited until dawn.” His jaw tightened. “And you did not come.”
Shame burned through her so fiercely she could hardly stand beneath it. “My father seemed better. I thought—”
“You thought your promise meant nothing once hope returned.”
“No! That is not true.”
“Then what is true?”
Her voice shook. “I was wrong.”
The beast looked at her for a long moment. The pale birds remained utterly still along the wall behind him, as though even they feared the shape of his temper.
“At least,” he said at last, “you have that much sense.”
He turned away.
Panic overtook humiliation. “Please do not send me away.”
He did not stop.
“My father is worse,” she cried, tears rising instantly. “He was better yesterday and worse again this morning. Mistress Hawthorne said the roses must be given for fifteen days without interruption. Please—please, I know I have done wrong, but do not punish him for it.”
At that he halted.
Slowly, he looked back over one shoulder.
The expression in his face was terrible—not savage, but wounded in some deeper, older way that wrath only half concealed. The sight of it startled her so profoundly that she forgot her own pleading for a heartbeat.
Then he turned fully and came back to the gate.
When he stood before her, the iron bars between them felt much too fragile.
“If I gave my word so lightly,” he said, “would you trust me?”
“No,” she whispered.
“If I opened my gates to anyone who begged prettily and failed me once, would anything here remain mine?”
She shook her head.
“And yet you ask it.”
Tears slid down her face unchecked now. “I am asking mercy.”
The beast’s eyes blazed. “Mercy is costly.”
“I know.”
“No.” His voice dropped. “You know need. That is not the same.”
She did not know what to say to that.
The silence stretched.
Rain began again, very softly, dimpling the gravel and darkening the shoulders of his coat.
At last Isla sank to her knees before the gate.
It was not a calculated gesture. Pride had simply gone. Exhaustion had gone. All that remained was love and fear and desperation laid bare.
“Please,” she said, her voice breaking completely now. “Please forgive me this once. I will come back tomorrow. I will not fail again. I swear it to you. I swear it on my father’s life. Only do not send me away empty-handed. He will die.”
For a long time the beast said nothing.
He looked down at her through the rain, dark and magnificent and terrible, like some cursed sovereign being asked to revoke a sentence already pronounced. The pale birds watched from the walls. The ruby roses burned in the mist behind him.
When he finally spoke, his voice was quieter than before.
“If you break your promise again,” he said, “I will make certain you never enter my garden.”
The words fell like judgement.
Her breath caught. “I will not.”
“You will come every day.”
“Yes.”
“Every day, Isla. Not when hope is bright. Not when fear is sharp. Every day.”
“I promise.”
His gaze held hers. “You will serve the full fifteen days without missing one.”
“Yes.”
“Say it properly.”
She wiped her wet face with trembling fingers and forced herself to speak clearly.
“I give you my word that I will come back every day and every night as you required, until the fifteen days are complete.”
Still he did not move.
“And if you fail?”
She swallowed. “Then I lose the roses.”
“And your father?”
Pain tore through her. “And my father.”
Something in his face changed then, though only slightly. Not softened. Never that. But steadied.
At last he lifted one hand.
The gate unlocked.
It did not creak or groan. There was only a soft metallic surrender, and then it stood open.
“Come inside,” he said.
Relief nearly dropped her where she knelt.
She rose at once, unsteady but determined, and stepped into the garden. The birds did not scream this time. The beast turned without another word and began to walk the central path, expecting her to follow.
She did.
At the heart of the garden, near the terrace where she had first reached for a bloom, he stopped beside a rosebush heavy with impossible crimson flowers. For a moment he only looked at it. Then, with a strange deliberate care, he cut one rose from the stem and held it out.
Its petals were dark and luminous in the grey morning.
Isla took it with both hands, almost reverently.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
He looked away. “Do not thank me for what your own failing nearly forfeited.”
The rebuke stung because it was deserved.
Yet when she glanced up at him again, she saw that the anger had not wholly gone from his face. It still burned there, but beneath it lay something she did not yet know how to read. Hurt perhaps. Or memory. Or some ancient fury not directed at her alone.
She held the rose tighter.
“I will come back,” she said.
He gave her a long, hard look. “See that you do.”
Then he turned from her, black cloak moving through the red and green of the garden like a piece of living night, and left her standing among the ruby roses with dread, gratitude, and the weight of her promise settling more deeply than ever into her heart.
This time she would not fail.
Because now she knew the truth of the bargain.
And because now she knew that one broken promise could wound far more than hope alone.