Beauty and the Rose: a Beauty and the Rose Novel Read online

  Beauty and the Rose

  a Beauty and the Rose Novel

  Stasia Black

  Lee Savino

  Copyright © 2020 by Stasia Black and Lee Savino

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Jay Aheer

  Contents

  Newsletter

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  Also by Stasia Black

  Also by Lee Savino

  About Stasia Black

  About Lee Savino

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  One

  Daphne

  I can’t believe we’ve come this far.

  Logan clasps my hand as we walk through his flourishing rose-filled labyrinth to a fountain at the center I’ve never seen before.

  It’s springtime and I swear I’ve never appreciated the world sprouting new life with such fresh eyes before. Logan’s hand isn’t enough contact for me, though. I grasp his arm and giggle as we head toward the stone benches beside the sun-dappled fountain.

  “I’ve never been so happy in my whole life,” I sigh and lean my head against Logan’s shoulder. His heat seeps into me and prickles rise on my skin. I’m so attuned to him. I never knew two people could be so in sync.

  He bows towards me, his large hand finding my cheek and easing my face towards his. Our lips meet, gently at first, then with greater intensity. My nipples rise and arousal trickles through me.

  I sigh into his mouth, “Logan.” A prayer. A plea.

  He wraps his arm around me and squeezes me tight—but not too tight. “I was so terrified I’d lose you.” His voice is thick.

  I press close, my chest grazing his as I lift my hands to his face. “You’ll never lose me, Logan Wulfe. Nothing on this earth can part us.”

  I go up on my tiptoes to kiss him again, but right before our lips can make contact, out of nowhere—

  “Wha—?” I cry out as the rosebush to my left suddenly shoots out a viney thorn branch that wraps around my neck.

  Another shoots out and wraps around my torso, pinning my arms to my chest.

  Before I know what’s happening, I’m being yanked violently backwards away from Logan.

  The thorns pierce my flesh and I scream in pain as I fly through the air.

  Logan’s mouth drops open and he lunges, reaching for me. I can see him fighting to get to me, but it’s like there’s an invisible barrier between us. And I know deep in my bones this is one battle he can’t fight for me in spite of his incredible strength.

  I reach for him, but more thorny branches pierce my skin.

  “Please,” I scream. “Not again!”

  But I’m smothered as I’m yanked into the labyrinthine bushes and then swallowed up by the ground.

  Buried alive.

  * * *

  I wake with a jolt, wanting to scream. There’s pain, everywhere in my body.

  But around me, all I hear is the mundane hum of machines. The murmur of quiet voices in the distance. Before I open my eyes, I know where I am.

  My lashes flutter. Each eyelid weighs a thousand pounds. My mouth is full of sand. When I lick my lips to wet them, the skin cracks. I hiss in pain.

  There’s an IV needle in my arms. White sheets tuck me into a medical bed. I’m surrounded by gray-blue walls with generic art hung here and there. Even the sunlight is dim and subdued, filtered through the thick glass.

  The hospital. I’ve been here before. Too many times.

  A chair creaks. Logan’s sitting beside me, his huge body straining the limits of the poor hospital chair. He hasn’t noticed I’m awake yet. His dark head is in his hands, his face bared. He’s not hiding behind masks anymore.

  I watch him for a moment, drinking in the sight of his large form in the Thinker’s pose. He’s a sculptor’s wet dream. The muscles of his shoulders, the veins on his forearms—he’s rolled up his shirt sleeves, the white fabric straining with the bulge of his biceps. The handsome slope of his jaw.

  I must’ve made some sound, because he raises his head.

  “Daphne,” he murmurs.

  I blink up at him. It’s like whiplash, going from the dream that felt so real to this. We were just so happy, walking under the sunshine, it was only a moment ago…

  But the monster always comes, doesn’t it?

  I’ll never be able to escape. It was stupid to ever think I could.

  I can calculate how long I’ve been here by the length of stubble on Logan’s face. One, maybe two days?

  I open my cracked lips. “Water…”

  He offers me a cup with a straw and I sip gratefully. Not so long ago, I cared for my father this same way. When he was on his deathbed. What goes around...

  “Where?” I rasp as soon as I can get the word out.

  “New Olympus General. The closest hospital to Thornhill was a shithole, so I had them medivac you here.”

  “Ah.” I let my head roll on the pillow. I can imagine Logan yelling on the roof of a hospital, loud enough to be heard over the helicopter blades. I want to smile but the muscles of my face feel weak.

  “How long?” I ask.

  “You’ve been here thirty hours.” He captures my hand and brings it to his face. I twitch a finger against his bristly jaw and find the strength to smile. None of this is his fault. He had no idea what he was getting into with me.

  “You...need a shave.”

  “Daphne. Fuck.” His big hands swallow my fragile one. For a moment he presses our twined fingers to his forehead, hiding his face behind our hands.

  I swallow. The sand is mostly washed from my mouth. Time to ask the hard questions.

  “How long?” I ask again.

  He raises his head. His eyes are rimmed red. “I just told you—”

  When I shake my head, he falls silent.

  “How long...do I have left?”

  He presses my hand to his face again. “The doctors...fuck.” His voice is muffled. “They don’t know. They say it’s your third relapse.”

  “Yes.” I remember the first two quite vividly.

  “I read your medical history. Daphne…” He bows his head almost to the bed. His voice comes muffled. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I set my right hand on his head and stroke his th
ick hair. Each movement is painful, like my very bones and blood protest.

  “It was in remission.” The inside of my mouth tastes bitter. I hate talking about my disease. My old adversary. So many battles lost and won. “I wanted to forget I was ever an invalid. I didn’t want to live like that.”

  It’s more than that, too, though I’m not even sure if I can explain it. I take another long sip of water before trying again. He deserves an explanation. “And it’s like, when I’m healthy, I can forget this part of me even exists. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism or maybe I really believed in my heart I was done with it.”

  Logan’s face is still pained, though. “But everything that we did...everything I did...I hurt you, Daphne. The games we played...”

  “No,” I say fiercely. Is that what he’s thinking? “I don’t want you to ever regret our time together. I don’t.”

  It doesn’t take away the agony in his dark eyes. “What have I done to you?” he whispers.

  “Not you. I was born this way.” This was always my destiny. Doesn’t he get that? The course of my life was written in my DNA before my heart’s first beat.

  Battleman’s. The disease that took my mother’s life. It lives in me now, waging war in a million of my cells. My body is a battlefield. It always was. And now I’ve gone and dragged the person I love most into the trenches with me.

  I drop my head back to the pillow and close my eyes.

  A male nurse comes in to fuss over me, and Logan retreats to the corner. I’ve had a thousand visits from nurses over my almost thirty years, but never with a dark presence brooding in the shadows. My skin prickles with awareness as the nurse checks my vitals, asks me questions, and prompts me to eat.

  “She’ll eat,” Logan interjects, making the man jump. The nurse must have forgotten Logan, but I didn’t. I feel Logan’s gaze like a touch. “I’ll make sure of it.”

  The nurse still has his hand on my bare back. Logan glares at it until the man snatches it away.

  “The doctor will be in soon,” the nurse assures me, and scuttles away.

  “Did you have to scare the poor man?”

  “He liked touching you.” Logan prowls back to his seat by my bed. He carefully replaces my gown and plumps my pillows—all the little chores the nurse forgot in his rush to get away.

  I laugh softly. As if anyone would want me like this, a frail bag of bones. “He’s just doing his job.” I sigh as I relax back onto the pillows.

  Logan grunts but doesn’t argue. He spends an inordinate amount of time smoothing my hair from my brow. His touch is featherlight on my forehead, brushing my hair back from my face, applying salve to my chapped lips.

  The look on his face makes my breath catch. Concern mixed with tenderness mixed with heat. At least there’s still one man who finds me attractive, even like this.

  But when he leans down to press a soft kiss to my forehead, his lips are careful. Chaste.

  “The hospital should hire you,” I try to joke.

  “Daphne.” Logan looks more serious when he takes a seat. “I want to take over your treatment.”

  I blow out a breath. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “Please, I’m close to a breakthrough. You’ve studied Battleman’s, you know—”

  “All my life. And I’ve gotten nowhere.”

  “You’re close. I can take your research—”

  “My father’s research. The patents you stole—”

  “It was my research from the start.” He forces himself to lower his voice, visibly reining in his temper. “Look, I don’t want to fight. I just want to get you well.”

  “It’s like my mother and father all over again.” Tears spill from my eyes.

  “No. I’m not going to let you...fuck, please. You’re not going to—” But he can’t finish the sentence.

  I look away from him and out the window, the grayscape hallowed in anemic light. “It was always going to be this way.” And now I’m just supposed to accept that Logan is going to be a casualty with me?

  “Don’t say that—”

  “Logan.” Just a whisper is enough to make him fall silent. “This has always been my life. Every time I walked into the lab, I knew I was fighting for my right to live. For my next breath. Battleman’s has been a part of me since I was a baby. If it wasn’t for the disease, I wouldn’t have even been born.”

  “What?” he asks, but he’s smart enough to piece it together from what I’m saying. Stunned horror spreads across his face.

  “It was my father’s plan all along,” I rasp. “He knew if they had a child, there was a good chance that child would carry the disease. My mother didn’t want to have kids because of it.”

  Logan shifts in his seat and the chair groans like it’s dying. Hospital furniture is way too rickety for a man of Logan’s size—he could look at it the wrong way and it’d fall apart.

  I want to make a joke to lighten the mood, but Logan’s calling my name. “Daphne. Are you saying—”

  “My father wanted a second chance to fight the disease. To harvest stem cells, run tests. To try new treatments.” I push my cheeks up into a hollow smile. “He didn’t want a child. He wanted a tissue donor.”

  Logan’s broad chest rises and falls rapidly, his lungs like bellows. His left hand holds mine gently while his right fist presses against his mouth. “That fucking fuck,” he growls, probably hoping his hand muffles the insult.

  Now my smile is real. “That’s my dad you’re talking about,” I say lightly. “Don't speak ill of the dead.”

  He lowers his fist. “If he wasn’t dead, I’d kill him.”

  “It’s done. It’s past.”

  “Did he tell you? That you were only born as a guinea pig he could experiment on to save your mother?”

  “Not in so many words. That would’ve made it easier.”

  Instead, my father’s actions told me the truth. Every time he led me to his lab. Every time he threaded a needle in my vein to draw blood. Every time he injected me with a treatment that had a chance to heal me and my mother—or make me worse.

  I learned my father loved me less than the results on a lab print out. Results he excitedly shared with my mother.

  “Don’t feel sorry for me, Logan. I had a better life than most. And my mother loved me. She was furious with my father for what he was doing. But most years, she was just too weak to stop it. And he hid the worst from her.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Logan kneels next to the bed, gripping both my hands in his huge ones. His anger is still there, but he’s pushed it to the back burner. “You have to know...you’re not just a lab rat. You’re more than what your father tried to make you. You’re smart and perfect and beyond beautiful. You…” his voice chokes. “You are loved. So loved.”

  “I know I am.” I stroke the raven-black hair from his forehead, wanting so badly to kiss him. “As soon as I was old enough to realize what my father had done, I had you.”

  “What?”

  “You were his student, so on fire. You said you were going to cure Battleman’s.” My voice softens. “And you were always kind to me. I was your teacher’s skinny daughter. But you were still so nice.”

  “Daphne...I didn’t know. I never even guessed you were sick.”

  “Oh I wasn’t. Not at that point. The disease was in remission. Not because of the treatments—they all failed—but because my body was young and strong enough to fight.” My father wanted to keep experimenting on me, see if he could poke the disease awake, but my mother wouldn’t let him.

  “You were my light in the darkness, Logan. My reason to live. Even before you knew my name.”

  But the nightmare feeling of thorns wrapping around my flesh and pulling me under the dirt flashes vividly through my head. Because I feel that darkness closing in around me again and it’s so consuming I’m not sure even the most powerful love on earth could keep it at bay.

  Two

  Logan

  You were my light in the
darkness. My reason to live. How can she say that to me, of all people?

  I hold Daphne’s hand long after she falls asleep. I have to be careful not to squeeze her fragile fingers too hard. When I finally lay her hand down, her skin looks so translucent, the blue veins are stark against the white sheets.

  I’ve knelt for so long my bones protest as I rise. I grit my teeth. I’ve got to get out of this room, get some air. I hate to leave Daphne, but my stomach is still roiling from what she told me.

  It was my father’s plan all along. He knew…

  What sort of sick fuck experiments on their own child? If he wasn’t dead I would destroy him. Not just his company. They’d never find the bits of him I’d flay from his flesh. I’d lock Daphne in the castle for as long as it took for her to forgive me. After what he did, kidnapping her would be a mercy.

  Guilt churns through me. For all my anger against her father, did I treat her any better? For all I know, my rough play weakened her and brought on this relapse.

  I carefully shut the door to her private hospital room, just barely resisting the urge to slam my head repeatedly against the fake wood. Who the fuck am I kidding? I deserve to have the skin flayed from my back for what I did to her.

  She was fragile and I spanked her. Made her stand in the corner once for hours. Made her crawl on the unsanitary floor…

  My hands clench into fists so hard my nails tear at my palms. I’m a monster. Depraved through and through. My love is twisted. I unleashed all my demons on Daphne, made her pay the price of my obsession.