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I ran for it anyway.

With my cardigan pulled over my head, I shoved open the rusted door and stumbled inside, breathless.

The first thing I noticed was the warmth. The air was green, wet, and heavy with the smell of living things.

The second thing I noticed was the roses.

They were everywhere.

They climbed the iron ribs of the roof, spilled from old stone troughs, and crowded the long wooden benches in terracotta pots. There were hundreds of them, from tightly closed buds to flowers fully opened.

These were not neat little bouquet roses. Their petals were a deep red that darkened almost to black at the edges, and their stems were thick with sharp thorns.

I knew them.

Five of those roses were dying in a jug beside my bed.

“Lockdown’s at moonrise.”

I jumped.

At the far end of the Glasshouse, a man stood with his back to me, working at one of the benches. His black jacket hung from a hook on an iron pillar. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled to his elbows, and there was soil on his forearms and hands. He held an old pair of secateurs in his right hand.

Kaelen Vance did not turn around.

“I know when lockdown starts,” I said. My voice came out higher than I intended. “It’s raining.”

“I’d noticed.”

“I’ll wait until it passes.”

“Wait somewhere else.”

The rain crashed against the glass roof above us and streamed through the broken panes. There was nowhere else nearby, and both of us knew it.

I folded my arms. “Do they teach you to be this charming at heir school, or did you inherit it?”

That finally made him turn.

He looked down the long green aisle toward me, taking in my soaked cardigan, wet hair, and general state of irritation. Something shifted at the corner of his mouth, almost enough to become a smile. His gaze dropped briefly from my face to where my wet shirt clung to my breasts, then snapped back up.

“Genetic,” he said. “My father has it in industrial quantities.”

Then he turned back to the roses as though the conversation were finished.

I should have left it alone.

Instead, I started walking toward him between the benches. The farther I went, the stronger the scent of the roses became, sweet and dense in the humid air. Beneath it was cedar and snow.

My heart began beating faster.

“These are yours,” I said. “You grow them.”

“They were my mother’s.” His attention stayed on the rose in front of him. “She planted most of them. Before.”

“Before what?”

He paused. The secateurs closed around a dead stem with a soft click.