Episode 2:The Cellar
903 Words
The Cellar
The east cellar has not been used for storage in years. I knew that because I once went there to hide, at nine. Cobwebs in the corners, one bare bulb, a smell like old stone and nasty dusts everywhere that never fully dried out.
Two staff members walked me there without seating anything. It felt cruel to me but I realized they’re just following protocols or is the word procedure….
The door locked from the outside.
I sat against the wall and listened to my own heart beat instead of thinking about Milo’s arm and the shenanigans that happened lately.
I can’t lie, thinking about it made my hands shake in a way that felt so close to shifting again, and I couldn’t afford to risk that twice in one day.
I heard multiple voices coming through the door an hour later.
“The Council will want a report regardless of what you tell the students.”
“They’ll get a report.” Alpha Voss said.
“Through me.”
“She broke a child’s arm in front of two hundred witnesses. This isn’t containable sir .”
“It’s contained until I say otherwise.”
The atmosphere felt heavy.. there was a dramatic pause that made both parties stare into each other's eyes in silence.
“People are already asking what she is. Some of them are asking why you’ve kept her this long? If this is what she becomes.”
I stopped listening after that. Not because there was nothing left to hear, but because I already knew it might not favour me in the end. Six years of being tolerated would definitely have a. What Ive impact on me someday,
The door opened at dusk and I saw Delphine, the housekeeper, who’d fed me more meals than anyone else in that house had in their whole life.
She never for once looked at me the way the rest of them did.
She didn’t say anything about the cellar, or Milo, or what she must have heard through thin walls. She just held out a plate.
“Eat something,” she said. “Whatever happens next, you’ll need your strength for it.”
That was the first kind thing anyone had said to me all day, and it melted my heart instantly.
“What’s going to happen?” I asked.
She hesitated, “That’s not mine to say.”
I ate because she’d asked me to, not because I was hungry. My stomach had turned itself into a fist hours ago and hadn’t loosened since.
Zack found a way in after she left. I don’t know how that cellar door only opened from outside but he must have taken the housekeeper’s key while her back was turned.
Hmm, smart.
He slipped through the gap before it locked again, with the way he was moving.. seems it’s not his first time.
He didn’t ask if I was okay… he just sat down next to me on the cold floor, close enough that our shoulders touched, and didn’t say anything for a while.
“Milo’s arm is set,” he said eventually. “He’ll heal fine. Actually, it would heal faster than a human kid would.”
“That’s not the part I’m worried about.”
“I know.”
I looked at him then, “Your stepfather told me I’m not his daughter. Like I ever thought I was.”
“I feel so stupid believing I was.” I uttered outwardly.
I could see remorse in Zac’s eyes. “He’s wrong.”
“He’s not wrong. He’s just finally saying it out loud.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Zack’s mouth opened up a bit. “I mean he’s wrong about what you are. Not what he decided to call you.”
I didn’t have the words to give a reply. Nobody has ever separated those two things for me before honestly. What I was, and what I’d been told I was.
We sat in deep silence for a while longer. He didn’t try to fill it with reassurances he couldn’t back up, and I was grateful for that.
“They’re sending for the Council,” he said finally. From the way he spoke, it felt like he was debating whether or not he should say it.
“Why??” I asked, though some part of me already understood. The Council didn’t get called for broken arms. They got called for something entirely different.
I furrowed my brows high. What does he mean by..
“Like what?”
“Uhm, custody, containment, punishment severe enough that a household couldn’t handle it alone.”
“I don’t know everything,” Zack admitted. “I heard him on the phone. He wants them here by morning.”
“To do what?”
He didn’t answer right away either. Footsteps sounded on the stairs above us. Zack was on his feet fast, pulling me up with him, but there was nowhere in that cellar to hide two people, and both of us knew it.
The door swung open and we saw a man I’d never seen before stand in the doorway, dressed in dark formal clothes.
He looked at me intensely like he knew me or something.
“That’s her,” he said, to someone behind him I couldn’t see. “The Council will want her awake for this.”
- Writer
