CHAPTER 8

Selene's POV

 Guest Wing The guest wing of the house was more quiet than the rest. I was left at the doorway of a wide, airy bedroom by Tibet, the window panes tall enough to make my own hands look small, the bed far too soft to fit someone like me. He informed me that breakfast was to be brought in the morning, until when I was expected to stay put in the adjoining study until Maya was ready.

Then he simply shut the door and left.

I lingered on the bed for a while, my hands clutched in my lap. The restrictions echoed in my ears. West wing, sunset, ask no questions, Maya first One step wrong and it would be over, done. A memory of my mother’s room flooded my mind the doctor’s voice, the sum on the bill which continued to balloon endlessly.

I could not risk a mistake.

Sleep offered only fragmented, patchy comfort, punctuated by nightly visions of the club the kiss and the dismissive gaze of Draven earlier that day. By dawn, my heart was racing as though I had run the length of the county, and I hastily dressed in the only decent clothing I had. The second-hand dress from yesterday was still damp with the scent of antiseptic, a smell that made me cringe.

I tried to smooth it out as best I could before settling down to wait. A soft tap on the door just after seven. Tibet, standing in the hallway with a tray of tea and toast I was not invited to partake of.

He gave me a curt nod.

“Maya is in the east sitting room, Miss Selene.

You will meet her now.”

We walked down corridors that seemed impossibly long light cascaded from tall windows in long golden swathes across the polished wood floor. I’m all for comfort but not to the point where my skin crawled with nervous discomfort.

“Focus on this, don’t get distracted.”

I kept my eyes on the floor in front of me. The east sitting room was smaller than I’d anticipated. Rows of low bookshelves lined the walls and there was a large, sun-drenched window seat overlooking the still dew-kissed garden below.

There, tucked into a nook of the window seat, knees clutched to her chest and dark hair tumbling around her face like a dark halo, a little girl in a simple white dress-her tiny feet tucked beneath her- sat oblivious to our entry. Tibet coughed quietly. “Maya.

May I introduce Miss Selene.

She will be your tutor for the next three months.” I offered a tentative, timid smile. “Hello, Maya. It’s wonderful to finally meet you.”

She didn’t flinch.

Her gaze remained fixed on the rain-swept garden. Tibet waited patiently for another minute before again, “Maya.

Introduce yourself to your tutor.”

Still… nothing. The silence thickened until it was a visible presence in the room. “You may begin when she is ready,” Tibet said, his jaw tight but his voice quiet.

He gave me a single, knowing look, and shut the door softly behind him, the finality leaving me standing alone in the centre of the room, unsure of what to do with my hands.

Maya turned her head at last. Her eyes, dark and unsettlingly knowing just like when I’d first seen them, met mine. Deep circles under them accentuated their intensity, giving them the appearance of bruises. She examined me carefully.

“You’re different,” she repeated.

“In what way?”

she demanded, ignoring my question, her small voice flat. “All tutors leave sooner or later.

The last stayed for a fortnight. Before that- a mere nine days.

They always leave.”

She spoke with an unnerving sense of detachment, as though describing a fact.

“Adults lie,” she added nonchalantly. “They promise to stay they promise to return.

They never do.”

I felt a tremor through my chest.

I thought of the mother figure who had raised me not the biological woman, but the one who’d scooped me out of the flaming wreck and vowed never to leave.

My own mother’s last, thin-fingered grip on my hand floated to mind, as did the hospital room and the relentless, ever-growing cost of a life not yet lived. I understood disappearance all too well.

“I will read.”

I replied, not in defense of an obvious vulnerability but because promises felt so easily shattered in these palatial surroundings, and were now utterly worthless. I walked over to a nearby bookshelf and let my fingers skim along the titles until they stopped on a collection of short stories a child could reasonably understand, even read aloud. I carried it to an armchair beside the window seat, opened it, and began reading the soft, dusty pages with a quiet, even voice, keeping my eyes fixed firmly on the text.

Maya remained silent, didn’t move closer, or interrupt.

Yet, I was aware of her steady gaze fixed on the side of my face. Sneaking a glance, I met her serious eyes, so ancient for such a young face, as though evaluating if I, too, were another one who would fade away. I continued to read. Each word spun out the morning, measured and steady.

Three stories were completed without a sound from her, but she never left her post on the window seat, even when I briefly stood to stretch my limbs.

As mid-morning arrived, a young maid brought in a tray laden with sandwiches and fresh fruit. Maya, until now apparently blind to the tray’s presence, eventually accepted a small apple slice, but nothing else, as I quietly pushed the plate closer to her on the window seat. Her shadowed eyes became even more pronounced in the bright midday sun.

“Why do you continue reading when I don’t seem to be listening?” Maya finally asked me, just as the late afternoon sun began to turn the garden golden. I gently closed the book.

“Because,” I said, “sometimes people need to hear another person’s voice even when they aren’t listening to the words.”

She peered at me for a while, her eyes wide and inquisitive. Then, without another word, she turned to look out at the garden again. A few minutes later, just as the clock struck five, Tibet appeared at the door. “That will be all for today.

Miss Selene.

Your dinner will be brought up to you at seven. Maya will be escorted to her quarters now.” Maya slid gracefully from the window seat and glided out without looking back at either Tibet or myself, her little bare feet making a soft rustle on the thick carpet.

Tibet followed, leaving me alone in the sitting room with the book and half a bitten apple on a table.

I went back to the guest wing with the fading light. The rule that you can't go out of the mansion after dark pressed on my mind all afternoon. I choked down the bland dinner the maid left stacked outside the door, then climbed on the window seat and watched the last vestiges of light fade from the sky.

Lights sparked and went out in one room, then another in some unknown part of the house, in the west wing wherever what whatever lived out there was.

Doors shut and footfalls receded in the distance. Maya's bruised, shadowed circles under her eyes had burned in my head since she left, of and why she had mentioned adults often lied when I came in in yesterday. The way she'd observed me all day, but without quite meeting my eye. Not spoiled.

Traumatized.

There was a real and very evident difference once one looked for it. Something had plucked portions from that little body and left shadows in its place. I washed in my room, slipped on the thin nightgown packed in the bag I brought, and got into the immense bed.

I sleep was easier than it had been the previous evening, although my dreams were unsettled the hospital the hallway. Collins voice a constant stream of slurs from what night at the club. Draven’s glacial glare fixed upon me.

I woke with the scream.

It tore through the vast silences of the old house, sharp and hungry, as if it was a separate being. I heard a high, childish sob, wracked with terror that bounced between walls and into every dark alcove of the mansion and out into - no longer there the halls until my chest clenched as though my heart was collapsing. Inhale shallow. I rose from the covers, clutching the bed sheets tight, my breath ragged as I listened for its return, finally landing as a broken, defeated sob that died as quickly as it had begun.

Then a return to… nothing.

Silence. There, in the suffocating darkness behind my door, all rules came shouting in my head. Don't ask.

No leaving after sunset. Nothing matters more than Maya. Except. - except for that cry.

The sound was still ringing in my ears and lodged beneath the ribs long after any other note of noise had gone it settled deep inside the structure of my being like an unspoken oath.