Page 61 of Legacy of Roses

When Rosalie sank into her beautiful, soft bed that night, she had to admit that Dimitri handled himself well in a crisis. And when he had wrapped a protective arm around her, she had felt safe and sheltered, just like previously.

She wasn’t accustomed to the feeling of safety. Even before her family’s troubles, she had always been bracing herself for disaster. Ever since her brothers had been born, she had lived with fear of the Legacy as a constant backdrop.

But now the worst of the Legacy’s threats had all occurred. And she was finding, to her surprise, that there was freedom in letting her old fears go. She had been so sure that Dimitri’s arrival spelled fresh disaster, and yet she couldn’t remember the last time she had felt so safe with someone.

Every time he saw a threat from Jace, he acted quickly and decisively. It was more reassuring than she’d expected. She spent her days doing everything in her power to shield her family from the consequences of her mistake, and she was exhausted.She didn’t want to acknowledge it, but it was pleasant to share the burden of Jace with someone.

They had won a minor victory in the garden, but he was still a threat. She trusted that Daphne and the triplets would have paid the debt already, but she didn’t trust Jace. She wished she had some certainty that it had all gone smoothly.

Although perhaps the scouts were a sign of the successful repayment. Had Jace sent them because he was suspicious about how Vernon had managed to repay the debt? Rosalie brightened. It was a comforting thought, and it made it easier to drift into sleep.

The next morning, she woke again to a breakfast tray on the small table beside her bed. It included a steaming mug of hot chocolate, and she hummed appreciatively as she sipped the sweet, creamy drink. It had been a long time since she had drunk chocolate.

She and Dimitri had reluctantly agreed they would need to stay out of the garden for the time being which meant she was limited to the inside of the manor. But the building was so large it didn’t seem like much of a hardship. She was looking forward to a day of indoor exploration.

A steady knock sent her hurrying for her bedchamber door. She swung it open to find Dimitri smiling at her, just as he had on the previous morning.

“Would you like to explore the manor today?” he asked. “I haven’t had a chance to uncover all the changes myself yet.”

“Yes, please!” she said promptly. She’d been planning to explore, but it made her feel better to have permission before she poked around someone else’s home.

As they fell into step down the corridor, she realized how comfortable it already felt to walk beside him. He was so much taller than her, but they matched rhythms easily, as if they had been walking together for years.

She glanced sideways at him. He still had the strange Beast appearance the Legacy had given him, but she no longer saw the Legacy when she looked at him. And any similarity to Jace was entirely obscured. He had become merely Dimitri.

It was a comfortable feeling, but also oddly disquieting. She wasn’t yet ready to explore it too closely.

They reached the entryway, and she turned away from the door that led to the sitting room she had already visited. The opposite wall held a similar door, so she crossed to it first, pulling it open ahead of Dimitri.

“Oh!” She stared at the room beyond. She’d been looking for a distraction, but she hadn’t expected something so startling.

“This is new,” Dimitri said wryly from behind her.

She nodded silently. That much seemed obvious.

They stood together in quiet admiration. Enormous windows ran along one of the walls, letting in plenty of light and allowing a view of the gardens at the front of the manor. It was a double story room, and the windows stretched from the ground to far above her head. Even though she’d never been inside the room before, Rosalie thought she would have noticed the windows from the outside if they’d existed previously.

“Was it a library before, at least?” she asked.

“It was.” He stepped forward and ran his hand along a shelf. “But it didn’t have nearly as many books. And it definitely didn’t have the chairs.”

Rosalie’s eyes jumped over the various features of the room, unsure where to rest. The Legacy had filled seemingly endless rows of shelves with books. The entire wall opposite the windows was covered in them, ladders giving access to the higher shelves. But they weren’t ordinary ladders. The wooden poles that made up the sides were made from living wood, leaves and roses sprouting along their lengths.

But the rose theme didn’t end there. The remaining books were scattered across the center of the room in short, half-height shelves each grouped with a huddle of chairs and small tables. The tables held lamps that shed enticing light in a soft rose color, emanating from lamp covers shaped like roses. And most remarkable of all were the soft armchairs.

Shaped like an actual rose, they were made of layers of soft material resembling petals. Positioned at an angle, the center of the rose was hollowed out, allowing someone to nestle within its heart. If someone had taken an actual rose and opened the center so a tiny fairy could use it as a seat, it would have looked like a miniature version of the chairs scattered across the manor’s library. Even the base was made of a single large green stem instead of four legs. It sprouted from a flat circle that allowed it to support the necessary weight, although it still looked like an impossible piece of furniture to Rosalie.

“Do you think we can actually sit in them?” she whispered.

“I don’t see why not. The Legacy made them for us, didn’t it?”

She gave a small squeak and rushed to the closest one. Sliding in was easier than she had imagined, and as she sank into the center, she sighed in bliss.

“I thought lying on my pillow was like floating on a cloud,” she said, “but I was wrong.Thisis like lying on a cloud.”

“I didn’t realize you had so much experience with clouds,” Dimitri said dryly.

She ignored him, too delighted with the chair to let anything dampen her enthusiasm. “It’s much more supportive than I imagined as well,” she said. “I think I could read in this chair all day.”

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