Page 2 of Blood and Roses

"What a weird old lady," Rosa said as she disappeared around the next street corner. She was about to head back inside when a black Mercedes pulled up in front of her, and a suited man stepped out.

"Good evening. Are you Miss Rosamund Wylt?" he asked formally.

"Depends on who's asking."

The man reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and took out a letter. Rosa took it between trembling fingers, her stomach dropping to her ankles as she spotted the heavy black seal and the 'V' insignia that haunted her nightmares.

"Have a pleasant evening, Miss Wylt," the gentleman said before climbing back into the car and continuing down the lane.

"Well, fuck." Rosa looked at the letter for a long moment before stuffing it into her jacket pocket and cursing her luck.

Rosa was paralyzed.Fear shot through her body, robbing her of thought and breath. The shadows of the room crept over her like exploring fingers, threatening to choke her if she moved or cried out for help. Her body convulsed, pushing her out of the dream with a hard jolt and back into the land of the living. Dawn was making its way through the cracks in the curtains, and her thrumming heart slowly stilled in her chest.

Rosa wiped the sweat off her face and looked accusingly at the letter sitting on her mirror table, its elaborate black seal broken in two. It had been a week since she had received her summons to go home to the north, the last place on earth she wanted to go back to.

Your mother is unwell. She needs her daughter at home,the letter had said, compounding her guilt.

Rosa's nights had been restless with dreams of never-ending corridors, dark forests, and the feeling of drowning in long buried memories of her father's bloody face. It was like living in a bad Poe poem every night and waking up feeling afraid and angry.

Home.

That word meant the tiny flat near the culinary school she had attended for the last three years. It wasn't the dreary estate in northern England that didn't even have decent Wi-Fi.

Who sends a letter these days anyway?She thought before her inner voice prompted critically,Maybe they knew you wouldn't answer your phone.

Rosa had hoped she would be left alone after she graduated from Oxford four years ago. She had studied literature and could speak Old and Middle English, but what she hadn't been able to do was get a job in that field. The student wage in her account didn't disappear, so she decided to follow her secondary passion for cooking and attend culinary school instead.

After years of education, she wanted to travel the world, work in the finest restaurants in each city to learn their delicacies, before moving on to another location. Graduation had gone as unnoticed by her mother as her university degree had, and Rosa had picked up catering jobs as she gathered her savings to leave London. Once the money from the last job had cleared, she would have left England behind her.

Now Rosa knew she had no choice but to go back to Gwaed Lyn. Her benefactors would send people to fetch her no matter where she ran. She had tried to escape to France as a teenager, and even though she was careful to cover her tracks, they still found her. Rosa had stepped off the train in Paris, and there had been a man in a black suit waiting to take her back to London.

In the last few days, Rosa had been forced to lie to her few friends, who were going to Ibiza to celebrate their graduation.They hugged and teased her, calling her Nigella as they often had, and hadn't questioned her further. What could she have said? They would never believe that she had no choice but to do what the letter asked.

Getting out of bed, Rosa washed her face in her small bathroom and pinned up her dark curls. Pulling on a green sweater, jeans, and high-heeled boots, she studied herself critically. She would turn thirty next month, and the plump softness of her youth had never quite left her. Her hair was her most redeeming feature—naturally, a rich curling auburn that framed her round face and dimpled chin. In her opinion, her hair made up for the size fourteen dress tag.

"Well, Rosa, that will have to do," she told her reflection after drawing some eyeliner around her hazel eyes.

Pulling on her leather jacket to ward against the wind, she picked up her overnight bag with a sigh of resignation. The rest of her things had been placed in three large suitcases and had been picked up two days beforehand. She wondered if her mother would rummage through them before she arrived to try to discover what her daughter had been up to in the three years they had been apart. Rosa grinned at the thought of prim Cecily's face finding her collection of vintage style lingerie. She may have had to wear drab uniforms in her job, but underneath was another matter entirely.

The train to Penrith would take four hours. Four hours of worrying what she was going to do, how sick her mother was, and how long she would be forced to stay at the estate.

"The Wylts have always served the Vanes. It is our honor and our duty," her father had told her the month he had died. It was one of the only memories she had of him from her childhood, and the Vanes had to own that too. A family's life lived in the shadow of another was no life at all.

What kind of an archaic concept were generational servants and masters anyway?If a Wylt didn't serve them, it wasn't like they couldn't find someone else. The estate of Gwaed Lyn was hours away from anywhere. She would be resigning herself to a life alone with no friends and no chances of meeting anyone.

When Rosa reached Penrith, there would be a driver waiting for her, as the letter had instructed. She took it out of her pocket, running her fingers over the thick stationery and the carved V in the broken seal.

She could barely remember the estate, an ancient stone mansion that seemed ridiculously opulent for the times, but she remembered seeing that V stamped into gates and stonework. There was no question of who owned the place and everyone in it.

The only member of the family she could recall was the patriarch, Eli Vane. He had found her hiding in the stables one day, and she would never forget her fear as his sharp eyes had looked down his nose at her. He was imposing and wore the kind of authority that could never be fabricated. He had sent the letter, and the tone with which it was written had left no room for argument.

Rosa put her feet up on the train chair opposite her and pouted in annoyance at the bleak scenery flashing past her. She would go to Gwaed Lyn for her mother, but after that, she was leaving, even if she had to take on Eli Vane himself.

"Seat taken?" A voice asked, jolting Rosa out of her snooze.

"Argh, no sorry," she mumbled, quickly brushing the seat down in case she had left any dirty boot marks.

When Rosa woke up enough to study her companion, she wondered why she bothered. The woman was filthy. Her long dress and coat were splattered with mud, smelling of dogs and camp smoke. She was holding an empty takeaway coffee cupfilled with coins. If living in London had taught Rosa anything, it was to ignore beggars, but in an empty carriage, she found it impossible.

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