Chapter 3 THE RULES

"You don't ask why."

The words sat alone near the top of the page, stark against the white paper, and Elena read them twice before she fully understood that this was the first rule of nine.

Nobody had come for her the night before. Elena had sat up in the unfamiliar room for hours, back against the headboard, fully dressed, flinching at every sound in the hallway, footsteps, a door somewhere down the corridor, once what might have been laughter, distant and unbothered, from another part of the house entirely. She'd braced herself so many times that by the time exhaustion finally dragged her under, some time past three in the morning, she'd almost forgotten what she'd been bracing for.

Whatever shortly had meant, it hadn't meant that night.

The woman who woke her the next morning looked to be in her fifties, dressed in severe black, gray hair pulled back so tightly it seemed to stretch the skin at her temples, the face of someone who had worked in this house long enough to stop being surprised by anything that happened inside it.

"Up," the woman said. "You've slept longer than you're allowed to. I'm Mrs. Bianchi. I run this house, which means, as of this morning, I run you."

Elena sat up slowly, "I don't understand."

"You will." Mrs. Bianchi turned toward the door, clearly expecting to be followed. "Mr. Moreau wants you downstairs. He doesn't like waiting, and neither do I."

She was given ten minutes to wash her face and change into the plain black dress and apron laid out at the foot of the bed, a uniform, she understood immediately, identical to the one Mrs. Bianchi wore, identical to what she'd glimpse on other women moving briskly through the halls as she was marched downstairs. Not a gift. Not the wardrobe of a kept woman. An assignment.

Luca was waiting in his study, standing near the window with his back to her, and didn't turn around when she entered.

"Sit," he said.

She sat.

He crossed the room without a word and set a slim folder on the desk in front of her, leather, unmarked, the kind of thing that might have held a contract or a deed. Inside was a single sheet of paper, the ink precise and unhurried, as though he'd written it himself and taken his time doing it.

Rules, the header read. Nothing else. No introduction, no explanation. Just nine lines, numbered, waiting.

"Read it," he said.

Elena read.

One. You don't ask why.

"When I give you an instruction," Luca said, watching her read it, "you have exactly two responses available to you. Compliance, or silence. The right to ask why belongs to equals. You're not my equal. You won't be asking me to explain myself, tonight or at any point after it."

Two. Nothing on your body belongs to you anymore.

Elena's stomach turned reading that one. It was broader than anything she'd braced for, not simply an instruction about the nights he called for her, but something that seemed to reach further, into every part of her at once.

"If I tell you to cut your hair, you cut it," Luca said, before she could ask. "If I tell you to change what you're wearing, you change it. If I send a doctor to treat an injury, you don't refuse the treatment because the injury embarrasses you. Your body stopped being a decision you're permitted to make the moment your father made his."

Three. Never make me repeat myself.

He didn't elaborate on that one at all. He simply let the silence afterward do the explaining, and Elena understood, watching his face, that this rule required no further detail, that the consequence of testing it was something he intended for her to discover rather than be told.

Four. You don't hide pain from me.

"If you're hurt, you report it," Luca said. "If you're sick, you report it. A fever, an injury, anything at all that compromises you. I expect to know immediately, not to discover it later because you thought concealing it made you stronger." Something in his tone made it clear this wasn't concern dressed up as a rule. "Damaged property left unreported becomes considerably more expensive to repair. I don't intend to pay that cost because you were too proud to mention a fever."

Elena's throat tightened at that, though she didn't let it show on her face. Property. He'd said it so plainly, so entirely without cruelty in his voice, that it had almost slid past her before the weight of it landed.

Five. You eat what is served.

"No preferences. No claiming you're full when a plate isn't finished. No skipping meals because you've decided you're not hungry." His eyes flicked to her, brief and assessing. "I don't tolerate waste, and a body that stops functioning because it wasn't maintained properly is the worst kind of waste there is."

Six. Never touch what's mine without permission.

Elena looked up from the page. "...What belongs to you?"

Luca's gaze moved slowly around the study, the shelves, the desk, the fire burning low in the hearth, before returning to her, unhurried, absolute.

"Everything," he said.

The word sat in the room for a long moment, and Elena felt the full shape of it settle over her only gradually, the way cold water climbs a body one inch at a time. He didn't mean the books. He didn't only mean the house.

Seven. If I can't find you in thirty seconds, you have broken a rule.

"I won't tell you not to leave a room," Luca said. "I'll simply expect that wherever you go, you can be located within half a minute of my deciding I want you found. The specifics of how you manage that are yours to solve. The consequence of failing to isn't."

Eight. Don't thank me.

Elena blinked. "...Why?"

"Because I don't do favors." His voice stayed perfectly flat. "Everything I decide regarding you is a decision an owner makes about something he owns. It isn't kindness, and I have no interest in being thanked for exercising ownership. Save your gratitude for someone who's actually earned it."

Nine. No one enters my bedroom.

Elena nodded, already moving to set the paper down, already assuming that one, at least, was simple enough to require no further comment.

"Except you," Luca added.

She looked up sharply. He offered no explanation for that one either, no warmth in the way he said it, nothing that softened it into something closer to intimacy. It landed instead exactly the way everything else on the page had landed: as ownership, stated plainly, without apology.

Elena set the paper down on the desk, her hands not quite steady, and found the nerve to ask the one question the entire list had left open.

"...What happens if I break one?"

Luca studied her for several long seconds, unhurried, the way he studied everything, and when he finally answered, the two words carried more weight than any longer explanation could have.

"You'll learn."

No threat. No further detail. Just the quiet, absolute certainty of a man who had never once needed to explain himself twice — and Elena understood, staring at the folder still sitting open between them, that the not knowing was precisely the point.

He closed the folder and set it aside, the matter apparently finished. "Elias will show you the rest of the house," he said. "Don't waste his time."

Elias found her outside the study a few minutes later, tall, quiet, dressed like the other men who moved through the house in dark, unremarkable suits. He looked at her the same way he seemed to look at everything in this house, efficiently, without particular interest, the way a man catalogues a task on a list.

"Kitchen, laundry, the east wing," he said, leading her through the house at a clipped, businesslike pace. "Housekeeping comes twice a week, you'll work under Mrs. Bianchi same as everyone else during the day."

"And the rest of it?" She still had the shape of nine numbered rules sitting cold in her chest, and some part of her wanted to hear them repeated by someone other than the man who'd written them.

"You've already had that conversation." Elias didn't slow down. "I don't repeat what he's already told you. That's not my job, and it's not a habit I intend to start."

Elena said nothing to that. There didn't seem to be a version of the conversation where saying anything would change it.

They passed through room after room, a dining hall long enough to seat thirty, a sitting room nobody appeared to sit in, a hallway of closed doors Elias didn't bother naming, and Elena found herself watching him instead of the house, the careful blankness he wore like part of the uniform, the way he never once looked at her longer than the tour required.

He left her at the end of it outside the kitchen door, already turning back toward whatever else needed his attention that day. "Mrs. Bianchi will have work for you," he said. "I'd start it before she comes looking."

She spent the rest of the day exactly the way Mrs. Bianchi's expression had promised she would, scrubbing counters that didn't need scrubbing, polishing silver until her knuckles ached, carrying trays she wasn't permitted to eat from. None of the staff spoke to her beyond what the work required, not out of any particular suspicion, she realized, but simply because that was how this house ran. Nobody spoke more than the job demanded.

By the time the light outside the kitchen windows had gone from gold to gray to the deep blue that meant evening had fully arrived, Elena had almost managed to convince herself that today, at least, might pass like any ordinary day of labor, sore hands, aching back, nothing worse than that.

It was Elias who found her, not Mrs. Bianchi. He appeared in the kitchen doorway without announcement, the same clipped efficiency in his posture as always, and the room seemed to still around him in its own smaller way, staff pausing midmotion before quietly finding somewhere else to be.

She turned, drying her hands on the cloth she'd been holding, and something in the careful blankness of his face told her this wasn't a passing errand.

"Tonight," he said, simply. "Your room. Mr. Moreau will come to you."

Elena's stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with hunger.

"How long do I have?" she asked, though she already suspected the answer wouldn't make the evening ahead of her any easier to face.

"Not long." Elias held her gaze a moment longer than the words strictly required, not unkindly, but not with any warmth either, simply the careful attention of a man delivering a message he'd been trusted to deliver correctly. Then he turned to leave as briskly as he'd arrived. At the doorway, he paused. "Be ready before he does."