The Devil's Possession のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 11 - チャプター 20

ElenaShe was beautiful.That was the first thing I thought when Sofia Moretti walked into the dining room, which was deeply unhelpful and something I immediately resented.She was tall and dark-haired and wore red the way women wear it in films, like the colour had been invented specifically for her. She moved like someone who had never once in her life wondered if she was allowed to be somewhere.I found out who she was from the way Alessandro stood when she entered.He did not stand for anyone. I had observed four days of meetings and dinners and corridor encounters, and he moved through all of it like gravity did not apply to him. He sat when he wanted. He rose when it suited him.He stood for her.I looked down at my plate and stayed there for the rest of the meal.The morning after, I was in the corridor outside the east wing when she found me.I had been on my way to the morning meeting. Eight o'clock. Alessandro's instruction. I had decided the night before that I would comply

ElenaI had fourteen pages in the notebook.Not all of them made sense. Some were lists. Observations. Things I noticed about the house and the rhythms of it, about the way the staff moved differently depending on which room Alessandro was in. On page six I had written a single line and underlined it twice.He is afraid of something.I had written it three days ago, before the blackout.I knew what it was now.I had not meant to find his study. The dark had come down all at once, the kind of absolute black that erases everything, and I had stood in the east wing corridor with my heart going too fast, running my hand along the wall until I found the shelf where I had noticed, two days ago, a box of spare candles.I lit one from the fireplace embers. And then I walked, because standing still in the dark was something I had not been able to do since I was nine years old.His door was open.I saw the candlelight reach inside before I did, and I looked in, and he was standing behind the de

ElenaSofia left on a Tuesday.I knew because the house changed. Not loudly. Not all at once. But the way a room changes when a window you did not know was open finally closes, the draught gone, the air settling.I did not ask where she had gone. I heard the cars at eight in the morning from the east wing window, and I watched them until they disappeared through the gate, and then I sat on the edge of the bed and breathed.I did not go down for breakfast that morning. I was not summoned, so I stayed where I was and ate the tray Agatha brought without speaking much."How long will she be gone?" I asked eventually.Agatha arranged the cups on the tray with her usual precision. "The signora comes and goes as she pleases," she said. Which was not an answer. But her mouth had the shape of someone trying not to smile.I looked down at my tea.The days after Sofia left had a different quality.They were not easier, exactly. Alessandro was still Alessandro. Cold, distant, unreachable in every

ElenaI did not sleep.I lay in the too-wide bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about the man in the entrance hall. The blood on his face. The guards holding both his arms. Matteo's voice going sharp and low.None of that was what stayed with me.What stayed was the smile.He had been bleeding from the mouth and his hands were bound and he had looked across the entrance hall, found my face in the dining room doorway, and smiled.Not at anyone else. At me. Like he had been looking for me and was satisfied with what he found.I pulled the blanket up and stared at the ceiling until the light came.Agatha brought breakfast at seven.She set the tray down and took one look at my face."You saw him," she said."Who is he?" I asked.She pressed her lips together. "I cannot say.""Agatha.""Elena." She said my name gently, with a weight behind it. "There are things in this house that are not mine to explain.""He looked at me," I said. "He was smiling. At me. Specifically. People do no

ElenaWhat Agatha showed me was worse than anything I was expecting. A knife. She had found it behind the second cabinet in the private kitchen off the east corridor, the small one that connected to his study, the one the staff cleaned on Tuesdays and Fridays but otherwise left alone.She had been putting away cleaning cloths when her hand found the bundle at the back of the shelf. She had unwrapped it before she understood what it was.The blade was long. Dark handle. And along one edge, dried and brown and unmistakable, a stain that had soaked into the metal the way blood does when it has been there long enough.She held it out to me in the doorway of my room with her hands shaking slightly."I did not know what to do," she whispered.I looked at the knife.I thought about the man named Corso with the split lip and the smile. I thought about the circled name in a file I had never seen. I thought about all the things in this house that lived behind closed doors and moved through corr