Rose in Chains by Julie Soto: Chapter-by-Chapter Book Summary

Jump to Chapter Recap of Rose in Chains: 1–9 | 19–28 | 29–36 | 37–E

Rose in Chains Chapters 10–18 Summary

This Julie Soto Rose in Chains chapter summary contains full spoilers.

Rose in Chains Chapter 10

Briony spends the day after her return unable to eat or speak. Phoebe is taken away to be sterilized, and Orion’s elixir is administered to all the women as a precaution. Briony asks Velicity about the missing fifth woman. Velicity says she last saw the woman climbing out a window. Neither Briony nor Velicity believes the missing woman is dead.

The next morning, Reighven watches Briony bathe in a deeply violating way. Later, a group of women returns from the baths with news that Sammy and Didion are alive and that the auction is scheduled for the following evening.

Cordelia insists they try to escape again and grows furious when Briony doesn’t engage. Cordelia breaks down, and Briony silently promises to keep fighting.

Canning Trow arrives and selects women to test an elixir meant to artificially trigger Sacral Magic, a heartspring bond that’s only supposed to work between willing partners. The women conclude that Canning has found a way to chemically override that condition. Coral and Jellica return hours later in silence. Larissa doesn’t return.

On the morning of the auction, Larissa sits next to Briony and confides in her about her father’s expectations and her envy of Briony, but Cordelia wakes and breaks the moment.

Hours later, Gains brings Briony before the Bomardi elite for a private appraisal. The appraisers estimate Briony’s value at thirty thousand gold, with a starting bid of fifteen thousand.

That evening, buyers portal out one by one. Reighven takes Cordelia and three other women. Briony understands that Reighven intends to sell them to fund buying her. Gains arrives and forces a tearful Larissa to join them, disowns Larissa, turns Briony’s dress gold, and portals himself, Briony, and Larissa away.

Rose in Chains Chapter 11

Magic restrains Briony and Larissa in the holding area beneath the Bomardi Circus, along with dozens of other prisoners, including Cordelia, Didion, and Sammy.

The auction opens with Vein as host. Larissa strikes up a conversation with a young guard named Parsons, baiting him with mentions of his father’s gambling debts and hints about how much Briony is worth. Parsons frees Briony’s hands. Before anything can come of it, Larissa tackles Parsons and kills him with shards of her broken chair, then tells Briony to run. The prisoners erupt into a brawl, but Bomardi reinforcements flood in and overwhelm them. Briony is knocked out.

Briony comes to backstage just as the auction is winding down. Cordelia is sold to Riann Cohle, and the two manage a brief goodbye before guards take Cordelia away.

Soon after, Briony is brought onstage as the final lot. Toven has been sitting quietly in the fourth row, and he enters the bidding against Reighven, pushing the price into the tens of thousands. Reighven bids sixty-five thousand, Toven goes silent, and the gavel falls. Reighven wins and comes onstage to claim Briony. Briony is lowered back below the stage, and Toven’s seat is empty.

Rose in Chains Part 2

Rose in Chains Chapter 12

Seven years ealier, when Rory and Cordelia got together, Briony found herself increasingly on her own because of their relationship. Didion started pursuing Briony, and she let him kiss her a few times before putting distance between them.

Briony had also gotten into the habit of studying under a willow tree by the lake, only to find Toven there one day using it as his spot too. Neither Briony nor Toven was willing to back down, so they started racing each other there after lunch every day. During one of those races, Toven tripped on a root and cut his head. Briony knelt behind him and used her mind magic to close the wound, but the closeness of the moment unsettled her. She deliberately left the job unfinished and claimed the tree for herself. Toven walked away.

The next day, Didion found Briony under the willow tree and kissed her. Briony let things go further than she had before, though her mind was elsewhere.

Rose in Chains Chapter 13

Briony is locked in a circus closet while she waits to be given to Reighven. Gains eventually lets her out and brings her to a dressing room, where Larissa is waiting. The ink on Briony’s arm suddenly burns and reshapes itself, swapping Lag Reighven’s name for Toven’s. Larissa bears the same signature on her arm, making it clear that both women have been sold to Toven. 

Then a portal tears open in the room, and Briony and Larissa go through it together, arriving outside Hearst Hall in the middle of a violent storm.

Briony thinks about running into the woods, but a fox cuts off her path. The castle gates swing open, and when the fox lunges at Briony and Larissa, Briony stumbles through the gates while Larissa is left stranded on the other side.

Finn steps out of a portal near the treeline and finds Larissa. He uses an elixir to burn the tattoo off her arm, extracts the dark smoke from her skin, and carries her unconscious body back through the portal. Briony bangs on the bars and extends her arm through them, silently begging Finn to do the same for her, but Finn tells her she’s safest inside Hearst Hall and leaves her alone behind the locked gates.

Rose in Chains Chapter 14

Briony looks for a way out rather than going inside Hearst Hall. She follows the fence and wall around the property until they end at the top of a hill overlooking an open field, with the mountains visible in the distance. Toven appears and warns her that the tattoo on her arm will punish her if she crosses the property line. Briony jumps across anyway. The tattoo electrocutes her, and she blacks out.

Over the next several days, Briony drifts in and out of consciousness, catching fragments of voices, including Toven’s and a woman who sounds like his mother. When Briony finally wakes properly, Serena Hearst is sitting at her bedside. Serena tells her she suffered a concussion, a badly reset dislocated shoulder, near-hypothermia from the rain, and severe electrocution. Serena also removes the spell that had been silencing Briony’s voice, then leaves.

Briony wakes again to find Toven alone in the room with her.

Rose in Chains Chapter 15

Briony is still weak from crossing the boundary barrier. Toven gives her no choice but to get up, since Mallow has been waiting to see them.

After Briony and Toven portal to Mallow’s mountain castle, Mallow questions Briony about her cousin Finola Rosewood, a top Eversun strategist whom no one has ever captured. Briony answers with more defiance than is probably wise, and Toven backhands her before Mallow can dish out something worse.

Then Mallow tears through Briony’s memories looking for information on Finola. Mallow finds what she needs on that front, but she also stumbles onto Briony’s old feelings for Toven and lingers there far longer than necessary. Mallow turns the same search on Toven next, clearly checking whether Briony’s feelings had been returned. Based on how pleased Mallow looks afterward, Briony decides they weren’t. Mallow leaves satisfied, with a lead on Finola’s whereabouts in Southern Camly.

Back at Hearst Hall, Toven asks what Mallow found in Briony’s head. Briony brushes him off. Toven then tells her to follow him toward the main house.

Rose in Chains Chapter 16

Toven leads Briony upstairs to the family bedroom floor. She tenses, fearing the worst, but he clarifies that the room is hers alone. Toven locks her in and tells her the house will provide whatever she needs. When Briony asks about the other Eversuns, Toven deflects. But that night, a piece of paper appears on its own with a list of names and where each person ended up. Briony notices that Sammy and his father are missing from the list, which unsettles her.

The days that follow blur together. Briony reads the same few books on rotation, tries the door handle every morning, and gradually stops eating and bothering to bathe. She pounds on the door and hurls things at the walls, but nobody comes. Toven doesn’t visit her at all.

By the sixth day, Briony has stopped getting out of bed. Then Serena walks in, takes one look at Briony’s condition, and tells her that she isn’t allowed to deteriorate because her well-being feeds directly into Toven’s magic. Serena orders Briony to get dressed and walks out, leaving the door open behind her. For the first time since arriving, Briony is about to leave the room.

Rose in Chains Chapter 17

Serena takes Briony to the kitchen to eat. There, Briony notices a Journal page on the wall with Sammy’s face on it. The Journal has declared him a fugitive and reports that he’s leading violent attacks, but just knowing he’s alive is enough to give her hope.

After the walk, Serena returns Briony to her room but doesn’t lock the door. Briony doesn’t realize it until she tests the handle and finds that it turns freely.

Briony waits until midnight before slipping out to the kitchen. Using the Journal page, she pulls up past news reports starting from the day of the eclipse. She works out that Sammy must have escaped during the auction when Larissa’s attack created a distraction. She also finds a report that says someone murdered a man named Del Burkin and took his heartsprings, and she’s fairly sure Sammy and Finola were behind the killing. The people she cares about are forming a resistance, and the possibility fills her with something close to joy.

Continuing her search, Briony learns that Velicity removed her own forearm to get around the heartspring tattoo. She entertains the idea of doing the same and mentally calculates whether the kitchen knife nearby could do the job, but she pulls back, knowing she’d be helpless and bleeding with nowhere to go.

Then the kitchen lights flare on. Briony turns and finds Orion standing in the doorway, watching her.

Rose in Chains Chapter 18

Orion catches Briony reading a Journal page about Sammy and sends her back to her room, locking her in. The page warned Briony that Eversun rebels might be heading her way, so getting into the Hearst library feels urgent. She believes the right books could help with her collar or tattoo.

Briony stops eating to force the issue. After three days, Toven comes to check on her, and she trades her agreement to eat again for ten minutes in the library. Once inside, Briony heads straight for books on magical boundaries, then realizes Mallow can read her mind and would see everything she looks up. She puts the books back.

Then the library seems to answer Briony. She whispers about how to block Mallow from her thoughts, and a book called Mind Barriers for Beginners floats off the shelf toward her. Briony hides it inside the slipcase of a larger book, grabs two novels as cover, and returns to her room without Toven noticing.

Briony reads through the night and spends the next day practicing the techniques. But the exercises remind her so strongly of her late mentor Finola that she breaks down crying. That night, Briony wakes to find a gray fox in her room. The fox pins her to the bed and bites her neck.