The Maid

Chapter 10

I put the key in the pocket of my dress and got out of that study before anyone could come back for it.

It took me four wrong turns to find the east stair again. The castle didn't make sense — doors where doors shouldn't be, hallways that turned back on themselves, and about a hundred paintings of dead men on horses watching me try to figure out which way was up.

By the time I made it back to the tower I was mad again. Not scared. Mad.

The dress was hanging over the chair where I'd left it. That was the only thing that had changed. The bed was still a mess and the tray was still on the table with a cold egg on it, and there was nobody in the room.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled the key out and looked at it.

New scratch. Bright brass under the dark. Somebody had cut a copy and they'd done it sloppy and fast and they'd done it on this key, on the end, where the metal's soft.

So Arthur had the only key. And somebody had gotten to it. Which meant somebody had gotten to Arthur.

Or Arthur was lying.

I put the key back in my pocket and went down for lunch because I was done being scared of a hallway.

I got about six steps off the bottom of the east stair before a man in a black coat with a clipboard stepped in front of me.

"Ma'am."

"Don't call me ma'am."

"Ella." He checked the clipboard. "You're to report to Mrs. Crane in the kitchens at one. She'll give you your list."

"My list."

"Your chores."

I just looked at him.

"He said to tell you," the man said, and he looked a little sorry about it, "that there's two kinds of people in this castle. People who work and people who get carried out. He said you'd know which one you'd rather be."

I stared at him. Then I laughed. It came out ugly and short and I scared myself with it.

"Where's the kitchen?"

Mrs. Crane was a short woman with forearms like a blacksmith and a voice that could cut glass. She looked at my dress. Then at my hands. Then she made a sound through her nose.

"You've never scrubbed a floor in your life."

"I've scrubbed a floor."

"Not one this size." She shoved a bucket and a brush at me. "East wing corridor. Long one. You'll be there till dinner. Don't go in the rooms. Just the hall."

"Which rooms?"

"Don't matter which rooms. You don't go in any of them." She started to turn away, then stopped. "Except the ones on the list. The list is on the hook. Somebody crossed out one of them and I don't know who it was and I don't care. You don't clean a crossed-out room."

That should've made me stop and think. It didn't. I was still busy being mad.

The corridor was long. Long and dark and cold, and the water in the bucket went gray in about ten minutes. I scrubbed until my knees hurt. I scrubbed until my shoulders burned. It felt good, actually. It felt like something I'd chosen.

Around four o'clock the door at the far end opened.

Lucifer came through it and he had a woman with him — dark hair in a knot, tall, maybe thirty-five, and dressed like money. She laughed at something he said. He didn't laugh. But he didn't look like a man who wanted her to stop either.

I got out of the way. Pulled the bucket in against the wall. Head down.

They walked right past me.

She stepped over my bucket without looking at it. He looked. Just a flick of the eyes down. And then he kept walking and said something to her about a horse, and they turned the corner, and they were gone.

I sat there with water soaking through my knees and my hands red and raw and I thought about that gray face in the study this morning. About the scratches on his hand that weren't there anymore. About a man who couldn't lift a chair last night putting on a suit and walking a pretty woman around his house like a tour guide.

"Keep working," Mrs. Crane said from behind me, and I jumped. "The King doesn't pay for a show. He pays for a floor."

I got back to the tower after dark. Somebody had cleaned up the tray. Somebody had made the bed. Somebody had put a folded pair of pajamas on it, gray, plain, cheap.

And on the pillow, a note.

My study. Now.

No signature. Didn't need one.

I didn't change. I went down in the dress with the wet knees and the raw hands and I walked in without knocking.

He was behind the desk. One lamp. A fire that had gone out and nobody had relit. The woman was gone.

"Close the door," he said.

I closed it.

"Sit down."

"No."

"Ella."

"No." I stayed standing. "I've been on my knees in your hallway since one o'clock. You walked right past me with a woman on your arm and didn't say one word. So whatever this is, say it standing up. I'm not sitting down for you again."

He looked at me for a second.

Then he stood up.

"Fine," he said. "You want the truth, here it is. There's a Council meeting in six days. The Council has, in this order: the right to audit my household, the right to question my staff, and the right to demand I explain why a girl walked out of the Culling alive."

"So?"

"So I've told them you're a servant." He picked up a piece of paper off the desk. "Not a guest. Not a prisoner. A servant. The paperwork's already filed. You've got a room assignment and a chore list and a name on the payroll."

"You told them I'm a maid."

"I told them you're my maid." He said it like that was generous. "Specifically mine. Which means nobody in that Council gets to question you, interview you, or take you out of this house for one single afternoon. If they touch you, they're touching my property. Do you understand what I just did for you?"

"Yeah." I crossed my arms. "I understand exactly what you just did. You put a leash on me and then you called it a favor."

His jaw tightened.

"Nobody in this valley is going to protect you," he said. "There's no law that says a cursed man can't turn a girl out on the road, and there's no law that says a girl can't get eaten by rogues on the way home. So I'm giving you the one thing that gives them a reason to be careful."

"I'm supposed to thank you."

"I'm not asking you to thank me."

"You're asking me to be your maid." I walked up to the desk. "You're asking me to scrub floors and stay out of rooms and stand with my head down while you walk past me with your arm around somebody."

"That's not—" He stopped. Actually stopped. "The woman this afternoon was an Alpha's daughter. She's married. We're not—"

"I don't care who she is."

He went quiet.

I got my breath back. My hands were shaking again, and I looked down at them, all raw and red, and then I looked up.

"Here's what I want," I said. "In writing. On paper. With your seal on it."

"What?"

"Your word that I'm not your mate." I held his eyes. "Because that's what I've been standing here thinking all day. That's what a girl's supposed to think when a man locks her in a tower and won't let her go. That this is some kind of fated thing. Some kind of destiny. He's your mate, Ella, he's just complicated." I laughed again, and this time it was worse. "My last mate was in bed with my sister. So I'd like to know. Before I scrub one more floor. Am I your mate?"

He didn't say anything.

"Answer me."

"No," he said.

"You're lying."

"I'm not your mate." His voice was flat. Dead flat. "The bond doesn't work that way. The bond doesn't do this. If you were my mate you'd feel it and I'd feel it and we'd both know, and I'd have taken you the second you walked out of that pit. There's no bond here. There's no fate. There's a girl in my house who glows in the dark and some reason I don't understand and one big problem we've both got that isn't going away."

I stood there.

Something in my chest felt weird. Not the bond. I'd felt the bond snap in Karl's bedroom and it had felt like a rope going slack.

This was the opposite. This was something in me going tight.

"Fine," I said.

"Fine."

"So I'm your maid."

"You're my maid."

"Then I want a uniform." I said it without thinking. "And I want to be paid. Real money. And I want a day off. And I want to know exactly what a White Wolf is before the Council meeting."

He stared at me.

"You're negotiating," he said.

"I'm a maid," I said. "I'm negotiating my contract. That's what people do. You want me to be your property, you're gonna pay for the privilege, and you're gonna answer one question."

He rubbed his face. He looked tired. He looked like he hadn't slept at all.

"Ask."

"The eight girls before me."

"Nine."

"Nine." I put both hands on his desk. "I want their names."

He went still.

"What?"

"Their names." I said it slow. "You said nine. You've been the King here for eight years and nine girls died in that pit before I walked out of it and you're telling me you don't know what happens to you at night. Fine. I believe you. But I'd bet everything I own you never once looked down at the paperwork and read their names."

He walked around the desk. Slow. He got right up in front of me and stopped and I could smell the soap on him and see the little line between his eyebrows that hadn't been there yesterday.

"I know their names," he said, very quietly.

"Then say them."

"Why?"

"Because somebody should. And because I don't believe a man who can't say them."

He looked down.

"Lisette," he said. "Maren. Charlie. Bess. Ana. Ruth. Delia. Colleen. Hannah."

I didn't move.

"Where's the list?" I said.

"What?"

"The list with their names. Their families. Where they came from."

"In the archive. Locked."

"Then unlock it." I picked my bucket up off the floor. "Because tomorrow I'm cleaning the archive, and I'm gonna read every single page, and if one of those girls came from a pack that's still holding a debt on a daughter they can't name, I'm gonna find it. And then we're gonna find out why nine girls died in that pit and the tenth one glowed."

He didn't say a word.

I got the door open with one hand and I turned around in the doorway.

"That's my f*e," I said. "You pay it, I'll scrub every floor in this castle and I won't complain once. And I'll keep my mouth shut about what I saw in that tower. Not because you told me to. Because I'm deciding to. There's a difference."

I walked out.

I got about three steps down the hallway.

"Ella."

I stopped.

He was standing in the doorway of his study, holding the doorframe with one hand, and he was looking down at the floor.

"The archive has a gray book behind the atlas," he said.

"I know. Arthur told me."

"Then don't read it in the archive." He lifted his head. "Read it up here. Behind a locked door. Where I can't hear you breathe."

Chapter 10 Ends