The studio air, thick with the scent of cut stems and wilting hope, crackled with energy.
Magnifico, resplendent in a suit the color of a peacock’s neck, clapped his hands, the sound echoing off the polished concrete floors of the Thorn Pit.
“Gladiators!” he boomed, his voice a theatrical flourish. “Your first challenge is upon us. A trial of elegance, a test of tradition, a celebration of love in its most… expensive form.”
He paused for effect, his eyes sweeping over the ten anxious faces before him. “You will design a bouquet for a royal wedding.”
A collective gasp went through the room. A few contestants, like the sunny blonde from Georgia, practically vibrated with excitement.
My stomach, however, performed a slow, nauseating flip.
A royal wedding.
It was the floral equivalent of a sonnet—a rigid, traditional form with centuries of expectation baked into its structure. It was everything I wasn’t.
My gaze flickered, against my will, to Julian Covington III. He stood tall and serene at his workstation, a pristine stainless-steel island identical to my own.
But while my space was already cluttered with my tool roll and a brooding little pitcher plant I’d brought for moral support, his was a minimalist’s dream.
He hadn’t so much as blinked at the announcement.
Of course he hadn’t. This was his natural habitat.
He was probably christened with holy water infused with David Austin roses. A small, infuriatingly confident smile touched his lips as he met my eyes.
It wasn’t a smirk; it was something worse. It was the calm assurance of a man who knew the game was being played on his home court.
“You have three hours,” Magnifico declared, gesturing dramatically toward a massive, refrigerated chamber at the back of the studio. “The Floral Pantry is yours. Let the petal games begin!”
The moment he said “begin,” a frantic energy seized the room. Contestants scrambled, sketching furiously in their notepads or rushing the pantry.
I stood still for a beat, the roar of my own anxiety loud in my ears.
Save the shop. Grandpa’s legacy.
The words were a frantic drumbeat against my ribs. To do that, I had to win.
And to win this challenge, I probably needed to create a cloud of white, pillowy nonsense.
I could do it. I knew the mechanics, the conditioning, the precise wiring techniques. I could make a technically perfect bouquet of roses and lily of the valley that would bore me to tears.
But as I looked at Julian, who was already striding toward the pantry with the unhurried grace of a prince entering his own ballroom, a different feeling took root.
Defiance. Hot and sharp. I didn’t get here by being a carbon copy.
My art, the dark and dramatic beauty I found in nature’s oddities, was the only thing that was truly mine. To abandon it now would be a bigger failure than getting sent home.
My jaw set.
Fine. They want a royal wedding? I’ll give them one.
But my queen isn’t a blushing ingenue. She’s a gothic monarch, a ruler of shadows and starlight, with secrets tangled in her hair like ivy.
Inside the Floral Pantry, the air was a chilled, fragrant paradise. Buckets overflowed with every bloom imaginable.
On one side, a sea of pastels and whites: clouds of gypsophila, elegant spires of delphinium, and roses in fifty shades of cream.
Julian was already there, his long, deft fingers inspecting the throats of pristine ‘Patience’ garden roses, his expression one of solemn reverence.
He moved with an unnerving economy of motion, selecting his stems as if curating a museum exhibit.
I turned my back on his world of light and plunged into the shadows. My hands skimmed past the obvious choices, seeking out the dramatic, the overlooked.
My fingers found the cool, waxy funnels of black calla lilies, their spathes the color of a midnight sky.
Next, deep purple, almost black, hellebores—the Lenten Rose—their heads bowed in a posture of moody elegance.
For texture, I grabbed فضة Queen Anne’s lace that looked like delicate, dark constellations, and for a cascading element, long, trailing tendrils of variegated ivy.
It wasn’t a bouquet of joy in the conventional sense. It was a bouquet of power, of depth, of a love that was eternal and a little bit dangerous.
Back at my station, the chaos began to take shape. My hands moved with a familiar rhythm, stripping leaves, clipping thorns, arranging the architecture of the bouquet.
Unlike Julian’s perfect dome, mine was intentionally asymmetrical, a crescent moon of darkness spilling from one side.
The calla lilies provided the stark, elegant structure, while the hellebores clustered at the heart, a secret treasure.
The ivy was the final touch, a wild, untamed caress that would trail almost to the floor.
About an hour in, I needed florist wire. The spool was on a shared supply table between my station and Julian’s.
He was there, meticulously wrapping the stem of a single, perfect peony. His workstation was spotless. Not a single stray leaf marred its surface.
His flowers stood in military-straight rows in crystal-clear vases. My station looked like a botanical explosion had gone off.
He didn’t look up as I approached, his focus absolute. “An interesting choice,” he murmured, his voice a low baritone that was as smooth and polished as his shoes. “For a funeral, perhaps.”
My hand froze over the wire. I straightened up, meeting the cool gray of his eyes. They held no malice, only a kind of detached, academic curiosity that was somehow more insulting.
“And yours is an interesting choice for a masterpiece,” I shot back, my voice sharper than I intended. “If the goal is to be utterly predictable.”
A flicker of something—annoyance? surprise?—crossed his face before it was replaced by that infuriatingly placid mask.
“There’s a difference between predictable and timeless, Raven. Tradition endures because it’s built on a foundation of beauty and balance. What you’re building…”
He glanced at my dark creation. “It’s built on shock value. It’s loud, but it has nothing to say.”
“My bouquet is for a queen who isn’t afraid of the dark,” I said, my voice low and fierce. “Yours is for a princess who’s afraid of everything else.”
I snatched the wire and stalked back to my station, my heart hammering. The nerve of him.
Timeless.
He used it like a shield, a justification for never taking a single risk. I poured all my frustration, all my defiant energy, into my work, my fingers weaving the final strands of ivy into place.
“Five minutes, Gladiators!” Magnifico’s voice sliced through my concentration.
I took a step back, my shears falling from my hand with a clatter. It was done. It was moody, wild, and deeply, unapologetically me.
And across the aisle, Julian was putting the final pin in the satin ribbon wrapped around his own creation. It was, I had to admit with a painful lurch in my gut, breathtaking.
A perfect, cascading waterfall of white roses, peonies, and delicate stephanotis, each bloom placed with mathematical precision.
It was flawless. It was a dream. It was everything the judges would be looking for.
The judging began. Magnifico, flanked by two stern-faced floral experts—a renowned event planner named Deanna and a celebrated horticulturalist named Dr. Alistair Finch—moved down the line.
They reached Julian first. He presented his bouquet with a quiet, humble confidence that made my teeth ache.
“Exquisite,” Deanna breathed, her usually severe expression softening. “The balance, the composition… it’s technically perfect.”
“The conditioning of these blooms is second to none,” Dr. Finch added, peering at a rose through a small magnifying glass. “This is the work of a true classicist. A master in the making.”
Julian gave a slight bow of his head. “Thank you. I wanted to honor the solemnity and joy of the occasion with a design that speaks to history and enduring love.”
My stomach sank. Enduring love. He even talked in greeting cards.
Then, they were in front of me. I held my breath as I lifted my bouquet.
Magnifico’s eyes widened. He leaned in, his expression one of pure delight. “Oh, my darkling!” he whispered, almost reverently.
“This is divine! So wonderfully, unapologetically gothic! It’s for a queen who rides a dragon to her own wedding! I adore it!”
A small spark of hope ignited in my chest. But it was quickly extinguished by the judges’ faces. Deanna’s lips were pressed into a thin, disapproving line.
“It’s certainly… a statement, Raven,” she said, the word hanging in the air like an insult.
“But for a royal wedding? The colors are somber. It lacks the requisite sense of celebration. It’s a very niche, very personal piece of art, but it completely misses the commercial aspect of the brief.”
Dr. Finch adjusted his spectacles.
“The hellebores are an inspired choice from a botanical perspective. However, the overall impression is more funereal than festive. It’s a risk, my dear, and I’m afraid it hasn’t quite paid off.”
My face burned. I wanted to argue, to defend my vision of a powerful, complex queen, but the words wouldn’t come.
I just nodded, setting the bouquet back on its stand, the dark petals seeming to absorb the harsh studio lights and all my hopes along with them.
The final verdict was a formality. We were all lined up, my heart a leaden weight in my chest.
“The winner of our first challenge,” Magnifico announced, “with a display of breathtaking technical skill and timeless elegance… is Julian!”
Polite applause rippled through the contestants. Julian accepted the praise with that same infuriating grace, a small, controlled smile on his face.
He glanced over at me, and his eyes didn’t hold triumph, but something that felt like a mixture of pity and validation. An ‘I told you so’ that he was too well-bred to ever say aloud.
I didn’t win. But I wasn’t in the bottom three, either. “Raven,” Magnifico said, his voice softer now, “your work was divisive, but your artistic voice is clear. You are safe.”
Middle of the pack. The floral purgatory of the creatively misunderstood. It was almost worse than being eliminated.
As the cameras shut off and the crew began breaking down for the day, I stood before my bouquet. Magnifico had called it divine, but the judges had called it a failure.
And Julian had called it a cry for attention.
He was wrong. It wasn’t a cry for attention. It was a declaration of war.
He may have won the first battle with his light and his logic, but my shadows had staying power.
This was far from over.