The Night the Roses Burned
Chapter 06 - The Night the Roses Burned
The hand dragged me backward into the dark.
I twisted hard, years of carrying laundry baskets and lifting sleeping children giving me strength panic made sharper. My shoulder struck a table. Glass broke. Ellie screamed my name.
Then a deeper voice cut through the darkness.
“Down.”
I dropped.
Something rushed over my head. A body hit the wall behind me with a sound that stole the air from the room.
The emergency lights flickered on in red.
Damen stood between me and a man wearing a guard’s jacket that did not fit him. Atlas had the man pinned at the throat, teeth sunk into the fabric but not flesh, waiting for permission to do worse.
Damen looked at me. “Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Ellie?”
“She’s here,” Paul said from the sofa, his arm around my daughter while she sobbed into his jacket.
I ran to her.
She clung to me with both arms, shaking so hard her little teeth clicked. “Mommy, he scared you.”
“I’m okay. I’m okay.”
But I was not.
Because I had heard what the man whispered.
Your father should have burned with the roses.
Damen crouched in front of the attacker.
“Name.”
The man said nothing.
Damen did not ask again. He looked at Paul.
Paul searched the man’s pockets and removed a small black card stamped with a white rose.
Damen’s face changed.
Matteo, still supporting Celeste on the floor, saw it. “What is that?”
Damen did not answer him.
Celeste opened her eyes then. Her fainting spell had ended very conveniently.
She looked at the card.
For one fraction of a second, she looked relieved.
Then afraid.
“What is the White Rose?” I asked.
Damen’s eyes remained on the card. “A story people stopped telling.”
“Tell it again.”
No one moved.
The red emergency lights made the room look submerged in blood.
Damen stood slowly.
“Nineteen years ago, my wife Sofia died in a fire in the south greenhouse. White roses grew there. The report said faulty wiring. My father believed it. The police accepted it. I did not.”
My heart pounded.
“My father was there,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“That is not good enough.”
Damen looked at me, and for once, the dangerous calm cracked. “I know.”
It surprised me more than anger would have.
Paul hauled the attacker to his feet. “Where do you want him?”
“The old wine room.”
The man finally spoke. “He’s coming for the girl.”
Every sound stopped.
Damen turned back.
The attacker smiled, mouth bloody. “Not the mother. Not you. The little one. She remembers what dead people forget.”
I pulled Ellie behind me.
Damen stepped closer. “Who is coming?”
The man’s smile widened.
Then his jaw worked strangely.
Paul grabbed his face. “Boss—”
Too late.
The man convulsed once and collapsed.
The doctor, still in the house, rushed in two minutes later and confirmed what the room already knew.
Dead.
A capsule hidden in his tooth.
I had heard stories about people like that. Men who carried death in their mouths so they never had to carry truth on their tongues.
But stories were supposed to belong to other lives.
Not mine.
Not Ellie’s.
Damen ordered the wing sealed. Celeste was taken to a guarded room. Matteo shouted until Paul’s men separated him from everyone else. The dead man was removed beneath a sheet.
At three in the morning, I found myself sitting in Damen Romano’s private library with Ellie asleep on my lap and Atlas stretched across the door.
Damen stood by the window, looking out at the rain.
“You need to tell me everything about your father,” he said.
“I was seventeen when he died.”
“What did you know before that?”
I stared at the fire.
“He worked too much. He smelled like soil and cigarettes. He never wore gloves even when my mother yelled at him. He loved roses, hated carnations, and believed rich people were lonelier than poor people because they had bigger rooms to hide in.”
Damen looked over.
“He sounds wise.”
“He was tired.”
“Tired men often are.”
I swallowed. “Two weeks before he died, he came home with burned hands.”
Damen turned fully.
“He said a chemical spilled at work. My mother didn’t believe him. They fought in whispers. He kept saying, ‘The woman wasn’t supposed to be there.’”
Damen’s face went still.
“What woman?”
“I don’t know.”
Ellie stirred against me.
Then, still half asleep, she whispered, “The rose lady.”
Damen’s hand tightened on the back of the chair.
“Ellie,” I said softly.
Her eyes opened, but they did not look like the eyes of a sleepy child.
“She says look under the wolf.”
Damen stopped breathing.
“What wolf?” I asked.
But he already knew.
He crossed the room, reached behind a shelf, and pressed something I could not see.
The bookcase clicked open.
May you like
Behind it was a small hidden safe.
And carved into the steel door was the head of a wolf.
