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Rose in Chains Chapters 37–Epilogue Summary
This Julie Soto Rose in Chains chapter summary contains full spoilers.
Rose in Chains Chapter 37
Briony and Toven attend another Friday gathering at the Biltmore. Briony keeps a note hidden beneath her collar and scans the crowd for the woman who slipped her the message the week before.
Dinner passes without incident until Liam mentions that a Summer Cannon will fire that night. Toven tenses. At midnight, a chime sounds, and everyone moves to the courtyard. Toven steers Briony toward the gardens so they can portal away, but Mallow stops Briony and Toven and makes it clear they’re staying.
Up on the platform beside Mallow, Briony finally spots the woman she’s been searching for. The woman stands at the front of the crowd in a tattered slip, with her hands bound and her teenage brother trembling beside her. The announcer, Vein, tells the crowd that the woman was caught conspiring with the resistance and helping her brother escape. Mallow sentences both siblings to death.
The boy is killed first by the cannon in full view of his sister. Toven stands behind Briony and guides her through a mental visualization to help her stay composed in front of Mallow. The technique works well enough to get Briony through the ordeal.
While Briony and Toven are on their way out, Ilana waits at the bottom of the platform steps. When Briony nearly collapses, Ilana catches her and uses the moment to lift the note from beneath Briony’s collar.
Toven portals Briony and himself back to his bedroom. Briony falls apart, then steadies herself and tells Toven that the people responsible will answer for what happened. Toven says nothing. He just nods.
Rose in Chains Part 3
Rose in Chains Chapter 38
Four years earlier, Briony and her brother Rory were at the Bomardi school when news arrived that a villager had been killed in Barta, a border town between the two realms. The tension barely settled before the school itself came under attack. The mountain shook, the building collapsed, and armed Bomardi forces poured in to seize Eversun students.
Briony got separated from Rory in the chaos and tried to find him while dodging capture. She eventually found herself cornered with nowhere to go, and Toven pulled her into an office just in time. His father soon arrived to collect him.
Through Toven and Orion Hearst’s conversation, Briony learned that Mallow had attacked her father, leaving Evermore’s fate uncertain, and that Bomardi forces had already taken Rory from the school.
When Toven hesitated to leave, Orion asked him who he was with. To avoid being recognized, Briony disguised herself as Larissa before appearing before them. Orion saw through it but protected her anyway, letting her know she had a narrow window before the search party reached her floor and that the borders to Evermore were temporarily open.
Before leaving with Toven, Orion slipped Briony something that would let her open a portal out. She used it to escape just in time, slipping away before Rory was coronated and the borders closed again.
Rose in Chains Chapter 39
Briony wakes up Saturday afternoon, hours later than she’d intended, still worn down from the horrors of the night before. She goes to the library hoping to research the Durlings, but she finds Toven already there with books and notes scattered everywhere. Toven is guarded and dismissive, refusing Briony’s offer to help without explaining what he’s working on. She spends the evening alone in her room and falls asleep over her reading.
Late that night, Serena wakes Briony and leads her into the bathroom while Toven opens a portal in the bedroom. Serena explains that inspectors are arriving in the morning to perform a medical examination tied to the virginity spell placed on Briony for the auction. To protect her, Serena performs a ritual using a silk gown, a crystal necklace, and enchanted water that both women drink. It’s in that moment that Briony understands what Toven had been secretly researching all day.
Then Orion steps through the portal.
Rose in Chains Chapter 40
Orion performs a dark ritual on Briony. Using a Starkish spell, Orion cuts Briony’s chest and chants an incantation that pulls her virginity out and seals it in a container. Toven then runs the detection spell on Briony, and it confirms the ritual worked. Orion leaves without a word, and Serena sends Briony to bed.
Briony pushes Toven for answers, and he explains that Canning has likely gone to Mallow planning to use Sacral Magic against Briony, which is why they had to deal with her virginity. She confronts him for keeping her in the dark, and he snaps that he has to do what’s best for his whole family. He walks out, and Briony is left realizing that Toven included her in that word.
The next morning, two inspectors arrive with nurses on Mallow’s orders to examine the heartsprings. They find Briony fertile but not pregnant, and the virginity test comes back negative. Cohle then orders the nurses to sterilize Briony, stating that all Rosewood women must have it done.
Just as the nurse moves to carry out the procedure, Serena acts. She throws the male nurse across the room, knocks Reighven out cold, and stands facing Cohle with power visibly building in her hands, declaring that she won’t allow anyone to harm Briony.
Rose in Chains Chapter 41
A fight breaks out between Serena and Cohle while Toven tries to contain the two nurses. One nurse escapes, and Briony goes after the male nurse herself. She catches him, but when she learns that he’s a prisoner whose sister is being held captive, she lets him go rather than drag him back. In exchange for his silence, Briony sends him north to find the rebels and passes along a message for Sammy Meers.
Before he runs, the nurse tells Briony that Cordelia has been moved to the Seat’s Castle in the mountains and warns her that Mallow suspects a male Rosewood heir still exists somewhere. The realization hits Briony hard. As a Rosewood woman, she could carry that heir herself, which means that if Mallow ever found out, no one at Hearst Hall would survive.
Briony gets back inside just long enough to check on Serena, then runs out to find Vesper badly hurt on the path and Toven being tortured by Cohle nearby. Briony and Toven fight back together, but both of them are nearly finished.
When Cohle turns and heads for the property line to portal out and report to Mallow, Briony uses a spell she’d failed to complete once before and stops Cohle’s heart just before he crosses the boundary.
Rose in Chains Chapter 42
One year earlier, Evermore was losing its war with Bomard, and the royal court was marching to a fortified lakeside castle called Claremore. Halfway through the journey, Briony discovered that Rory had slipped ahead to reinforce the castle’s magical defenses, leaving her and her cousin Finola to maintain the camp’s protective wards.
That evening, Briony ended a late-night arrangement with Didion Winchester, who was more invested than she was. She walked away feeling nothing, which told her everything she needed to know. A merchant woman named Delilah then approached and claimed her family had gotten lost in the woods. Briony followed her in, walked into an ambush, and came face to face with Reighven and Toven.
Reighven seized Briony and tried to pull her through a portal. Delilah’s actual family appeared and created a distraction for Briony to break loose. She ran, but Toven dropped trees across her path to steer her in a specific direction. A spell from one of the merchants knocked him down, and she escaped.
Briony hid until the fighting died out, then found all four merchants dead. Toven lay nearby, badly wounded, with both arms extended toward the bodies. He’d killed all four at once through a split Heartstop casting, something considered impossible even for his father. Briony weighed whether to kill him, then covered him with branches and returned to camp.
Rose in Chains Chapter 43
Briony has just killed Cohle and is holding herself together by shutting her emotions down completely. She and Toven carry Cohle’s body back toward the house, pausing along the way to heal Vesper, who has a badly broken spine, with Toven talking Briony through the procedure.
Back inside, Serena is keeping watch over Reighven and a female nurse. Briony tells Serena what happened, including her decision to let the male nurse go after learning that Mallow’s people are holding his sister captive.
Serena quickly settles on a cover story where Serena is the one who killed Cohle, insisting that Toven can’t take the fall for killing on Briony’s behalf. The immediate problem is that Reighven and the female nurse both saw the truth and will report back to Mallow. Serena can’t alter their memories herself because Mallow reads her mind too often and would recognize her techniques, so Briony volunteers to do it with Serena guiding her through the process.
Briony, Serena, and Toven start with the female nurse, rewriting the morning so that Cohle is the aggressor and Serena is the one who kills him. Then they move on to Reighven, and Briony forces herself through her deep revulsion to get it done.
The moment Briony, Serena, and Toven finish, Orion walks into the room and finds all three of them there, looking murderous.
Rose in Chains Chapter 44
Serena fills Orion in. Cohle is dead, Reighven and a nurse are unconscious, and Orion is irritated that Briony was involved in the memory work. He reviews Briony’s alterations and calls them sloppy but serviceable. Briony coolly reminds him that they still need a dead body and walks out before he can say anything else.
Toven follows Briony upstairs and tells her that she’s holding too much in and needs to let go. When she finally does, she sobs through everything she’d been suppressing, not just killing Cohle but grief over Phoebe, Cordelia, Rory, and more. Toven holds her through it, and the two of them kiss. The kiss deepens and intensifies until a knock at the door pulls them back.
A moment later, Toven answers the door, composing himself almost instantly, and leaves after Serena tells him that Mallow will arrive after dark.
Serena comes in and tells Briony she’s proud of her. She then reveals that she’s a seer and that Mallow searches her mind every day because of it. Briony asks whether Serena’s decision to protect the Rosewood bloodline was tied to a vision about Toven fathering the prophesied heir. Serena says no. She simply wanted to give Briony a choice. Briony takes that in and starts rebuilding her mental barriers before Mallow arrives.
Rose in Chains Chapter 45
Mallow arrives at dawn on dragonback. She wastes no time and pulls Briony into the drawing room, where she begins ripping through Briony’s mind with brutal, painful force. While she can, Briony slips into Mallow’s unguarded mind and finds a single question living right at the surface: “Where is he?” Briony realizes Mallow is searching for Rory and that he might still be alive. To send Mallow in the wrong direction, Briony plants a false memory of Rory talking fondly about the harbors at Daward. Mallow takes the bait and withdraws from Briony’s mind.
Before she passes out, Briony catches Mallow offering Orion the position that Cohle’s death left vacant. Orion turns down the top role but accepts a promotion. Mallow also questions Toven about his bond with Briony, and he smoothly covers for both of them.
When Briony wakes, she finds a note she’d received earlier and becomes convinced Rory wrote it. She starts thinking seriously about how to escape and how to kill Mallow.
Toven comes to tell Briony that the bonding ceremony needs to happen soon. The conversation quickly turns into a fight, and Briony ends it by telling Toven she thinks Rory is alive and asking him plainly whether he plans to help her or stand in her way.
Rose in Chains Epilogue
The dragon flies to Mallow’s castle after Mallow summons her, but the dragon remains resistant and unimpressed. Mallow pushes the dragon to complete their bond, insisting that she’s close to eliminating the heir and will soon be able to keep her promises. The dragon isn’t convinced and flies off.
Back at the cave, the dragon finds a rust-haired man and a one-armed woman waiting for her. They’ve come to take Rory, the boy the dragon has been sheltering. Rory tells the dragon that he needs to leave to find his sister and thanks her for her care. The dragon steps aside and lets Rory go. The three travelers head off together, leaving the dragon alone.
Disclaimer: This is a Rose in Chains summary. The original work is the property of Julie Soto and Forever.
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