Unopened Rose Novels & Stories

Ivy opened her eyes by a quarter, she felt a little bit muddle headed but she shook it off and opened her eyes fully. ‘Where am I’ she asked herself shielding her eyes from the light, she looked at the unfamiliar ceiling and sat up on the bed. The room was unfamiliar and full of unrecognizable antiques. Ivy suddenly breathed in, the air felt a lot fresher, she sniffed again, she had never breathed in air that was as fresh as this before. She wanted to stand up but her dress felt heavy. She looked at her dress only to see herself wearing a corset.

The quiet of the locker room felt oppressive now, and she could almost hear her own heartbeat in the stillness. With careful fingers, she tore open the envelope, her mind racing with possibilities. What was this? Who would leave something like this for her? Inside, she found a black rose—its petals wilted and fragile, as though it had been picked long ago and left to die. Its deep color seemed to draw all the light from the room, casting an eerie shadow on the paper beneath it. Olivia’s breath hitched as she carefully picked it up, her skin cold as she held it in her palm.

I opened the door just a few inches and saw a small cardboard box sitting on the carpet with no name and no return address, so I pulled it inside and opened the lid while the others crowded around me to see what was inside. Resting on a bed of white tissue paper was a single rose made of delicate glass and the stem was broken in half so it looked dead and jagged, and I knew immediately that it was a message from Elena Romano because that rose was the symbol of the investment firm we had burned down in Berlin.

I needed to figure out who could have done this and why. The rose. I lifted it to my nose, inhaling its faint, sweet scent. Black roses were rare, difficult to cultivate. They weren't something you could pick up at any florist. Whoever had left this had gone to considerable effort to make a statement. I set the rose down on the vanity, next to the note, and pulled out my phone. My fingers hovered over Luca's name. He would know what to do. He always knew what to do. But I couldn't involve him in this. Not after what had happened between us. Not when I was still trying to figure out what I even wanted from him.

After several long minutes, he looked up. "No explosives. No chemical signatures. It's safe to open, as far as we can tell." Jethro nodded, and I watched him pull on a pair of gloves before carefully lifting the lid himself, unwilling to let anyone else be the one to discover whatever waited inside. Roses. Dozens of them, wilted and browning at the edges, clearly cut days ago and left to die deliberately before being packaged. Nestled among them, a small card. Jethro picked it up, his expression going very still as he read it silently before turning it toward me.

Just present, one by one and in small groups, filling the edges of the garden and the approach beyond the gate with the quiet attention of wolves who understood that something they had been part of without fully knowing it had just reached the thing it had been reaching toward. The rose was — I don't have a word that does it properly. Dark red, fully open, the kind of colour that looks like it came from somewhere deeper than the surface. Three of them. All three buds open now, the smaller two having caught up to the original in the last day. They caught the afternoon light and held it the way some things hold light — not reflecting it back unchanged but doing something to it, making it more

Rose sighed loudly and lowered her head in disbelief. She took a deep breath and opened the door. Everyone was still sitting in the living room. The moment the door opened, they all stopped talking and looked at Rose. Everyone froze within seconds. She had no makeup on. She was only dressed in a white floral dress with her hair tied neatly in a ponytail. Yet Kingsley’s heart skipped a beat. Emerson and Fiona looked at her, and their eyes widened in awe. Queenie looked at everyone and cleared her throat, “Ahem! Everyone, stop staring. You will make her feel uncomfortable. Come on, sweetie! Sit down!”

The stranger placed a single object flat onto the pristine wooden counter. Then, before Amora could even step forward, the figure spun around and glided out the front door, vanishing into the crowded street like a wisp of smoke. Amora’s heart hammered against her ribs. She walked slowly toward the edge of the counter, her breath hitching in her throat as she looked down at what had been left behind. Resting on the clean pine wood was a single, flawless rose. But the petals weren't red, pink, or white. They were a deep, velvet, midnight black. The stem was thick, covered in sharp, jagged thorns, and a single drop of dark, ink-like liquid clung to the leaf like a drop of poison.

Who would be watching a curvy girl like me so closely? When I returned home in the late afternoon, something was different. A single red rose lay on my nightstand. Perfect, thornless, its scent filling the room. My heart skipped. I picked it up, inhaling deeply, the velvet petals brushing my lips. “Where did you come from?” I whispered to the empty apartment. No note. No explanation. A secret admirer? The thought made my cheeks burn and a flutter bloom low in my belly. I placed it in a glass of water, smiling shyly at it before changing for the evening.

My shoes made no sound on the carpet, it was a single white rose. It had been cut with a long stem and the thorns carefully shaved away, so that nothing on it could hurt. The petals were barely open. It was still beaded with water, as if it had been cut that same hour. I looked for a card, but there was none. I turned the rose over in my fingers, and under the bloom, tied around the stem with a thin black thread, I found nothing at all but a single small knot. No name, no message, no apology.