THE MAID HE CAN'T FORGET

STELLA

My body ached before I even opened my eyes, a dull, heavy tiredness that sat in every muscle and made the silk sheets feel like they weighed a hundred pounds. Part of it was the crates I had hauled the day before, and part was a night of holding myself so rigid with fear that even my jaw hurt. The room was still dark, the storm reduced to a soft patter against the windows, and dawn hadn't arrived yet. Good. I needed to be gone before he woke up properly, because I had no idea how I would look him in the face, or whose face he would think he was looking at.

I slid out of the bed slowly, biting back a whimper when my bruised hips brushed the edge of the mattress, and waited for my legs to stop shaking before I trusted them. I found the silk robe on the floor and pulled it on with unsteady hands, tying it tight, and every small movement reminded me how far from my own life I had wandered in a single night. My mind kept circling the same thought, that I had done it, that it was over, and that Mama's next treatment was safe for now. I held on to that like a rope and took one step toward the door.

An arm snaked around my waist and yanked me back.

He didn't open his eyes. He was still more asleep than awake, I could tell by the looseness of his grip, the way his breathing hadn't changed. But his hand held on with the unconscious certainty of someone who had decided something and hadn't bothered to inform his brain about it yet. A long moment passed, and I stopped breathing altogether, certain that this was the second he would wake and finally see the wrong face in the gray light.

"Tonight too," he muttered. Then his hand loosened and he turned onto his side and the slow breathing resumed like nothing had happened at all. I stood there in the dark beside his bed for three full seconds, heart hammering, wondering what exactly he meant and whether I had just been handed a second sentence on top of the first. Then I gathered the silk from the floor and walked to the door on silent feet and let myself out.

Lady Valentina was in the corridor.

Of course she was. Dressed already, composed already, not a strand of gold hair out of place despite the hour, as if she had been standing there all night and the cold had simply declined to touch her. She looked at me the way a woman looks at an invoice she is checking for errors, quick and methodical and thorough. Her eyes moved across my throat, my wrists, the careful way I was holding myself, and I felt like a piece of furniture being inspected for damage after a party.

"Did he say anything?" she asked.

"No."

I didn't tell her about the three words he had muttered into his pillow. They felt like the only thing from that room that still belonged to me, and some stubborn instinct told me not to hand them over. Her gaze snagged on the bruising along my collarbone, and something moved across her expression. I braced for it, for sympathy or guilt or some acknowledgment that what she had arranged was not a small thing to ask of another person.

Instead her shoulders dropped slightly. The tension she had been carrying since I walked out of her chambers the night before released itself in one quiet exhale. She looked, unmistakably, relieved. Not for me. For herself. It was the relief of a woman who had just confirmed that someone else had absorbed something she had been dreading, and I understood then that I had not been bought to help her, only to stand where she could not.

She reached into her pocket without a word and held out a small glass vial. A pregnancy medicine. Clear liquid, faintly bitter smelling even from a distance.

I took it.

She smoothed the front of her dress and walked back toward her chambers, and I waited for a thank you that I already knew would never come. There was no acknowledgment of what the night had cost, only the soft sound of her door closing behind her, the empty corridor, and the vial cold in my palm. I stood there for a moment in the dim hallway, thinking how strange it was that the one thing she had thought to prepare for me was the thing that protected her own bloodline, and then I swallowed it alone.

To Alpha Derek, I was just Valentina acting differently in the dark, warmer and bolder than he was used to. The thought made my chest tight with shame and exhaustion, because it meant the only version of me he had touched was a stranger I had been forced to play, and I slipped away to the servants' quarters before anyone could see my face.

The day dragged like a punishment. I moved through my usual duties with gritted teeth, cleaning, carrying trays, keeping my head down, and every step reminded me of the night before. My muscles were stiff and my head was foggy, and when I bent to pick up broken glass in the east wing a sharp pain shot through my back, an old bruise from the warehouse crates making sure I remembered it. I kept replaying the room, the fire, the rain, and the way his voice had gone quiet right before I lost consciousness. I wanted to scrub the whole memory out of me like blood from linen, but memories don't come out with soap.

By afternoon, I heard the whispers from the other maids.

"Alpha Derek seems… off today."

"He keeps watching Lady Valentina like he's waiting for something."

I kept my face blank and scrubbed the floor harder, though my hands had started to tremble. Of course he was irritated. The real Valentina had been her usual cold, distant self all day, with polite smiles, perfect posture and nothing behind her eyes. She was nothing like the woman who had sat in that firelit room with him the night before, and he wanted that version back. He had no idea she only existed when I took her place, and I had no idea how long I could keep that secret alive before it swallowed me.

Night fell too quickly.

I was wiping down a marble console table near the grand staircase when the atmosphere in the palace changed. Servants froze mid-step and voices dropped to fearful murmurs, and the whole building seemed to pull in a breath and hold it.

"He's back."

"Alpha Damien returned an hour ago."

The name alone sucked the warmth from the air. I kept working, but my hands trembled so badly that I nearly dropped the cloth. Everyone lowered their heads as heavy footsteps echoed through the entrance hall, and even the guards seemed smaller. I had heard stories about Alpha Damien in the servants' quarters, always in whispers and never twice from the same person, and I knew the smartest thing a maid could do was stay invisible. I shouldn't have looked.

But I did.

Alpha Damien stood in the center of the hall, tall and unnaturally still. His dark coat clung to broad shoulders, rain dripping from it onto the polished floor, and power rolled off him in heavy waves, cold and oppressive, like the moment before lightning struck. It was nothing like the burning heat of Derek's presence. This was something darker, something that felt like violence wrapped in perfect control, and my instincts screamed at me to make myself smaller.

He started walking forward and everyone bowed deeper. My stupid, exhausted body didn't move fast enough, and for one second my gaze lifted and met his. His steps faltered.

Those eyes, dark and piercing, locked onto mine, and the air thickened until I could barely pull it into my lungs. Something shifted in his expression, a tiny crack in that icy mask, and I had the impossible feeling that he had recognized something in me I hadn't shown anyone. I dropped my head immediately, heart hammering against my ribs, my fingers gripping the cleaning cloth until my knuckles hurt. Alpha Damien stood frozen for another heartbeat, then continued walking, but the tension in the hall had doubled. I felt his eyes on me even as he moved past, burning into the back of my neck.

I didn't dare look up again.

But I knew, deep in my bones, that with Alpha Damien returning to the Nightwing pack he must have returned because of something very important, and it was either good or bad, very, very bad.