Contract Marriage with Mr Billionaire

Chapter Three

ELARA’S POV

The first full day in Blackwood Manor was weird to me. I woke in a vast, canopied bed, drowning in linen, to the sound of… nothing. No traffic, no voices, no hum of a refrigerator. Just a deep, watchful quiet. The air in my room was cold, a chill that seeped from the stone walls no matter how high the ornate radiator hissed.

Mrs. Danvers appeared at my door precisely at eight, with a breakfast tray. Her flinty eyes scanned the room, as if checking for signs of contamination. “Mr. Blackwood has business in the city,” she stated, her voice dry as parchment. “You are to familiarize yourself with the public south parlour and the library today. The gardens are off-limits. They are… being restored.”

Off-limits. The words were becoming the theme of my life. I ate tasteless eggs by the window, watching the mist cling to the skeletal shapes of what looked like a once-grand garden. Something moved out there, a flash of a brown jacket, a glimpse of hair. The groundskeeper, Gabriel. He was cutting back the violent snarl of brambles against a far wall. He worked with a fierce, quiet focus, never looking up at the house.

I spent the morning drifting through the “public” rooms Mrs. Danvers had shown me. Each was more beautifully lifeless than the last. Perfectly arranged silk couches no one sat on, grand pianos with lids forever closed, shelves of books that smelled of dust, not reading. The library was the worst. It was two stories of leather-bound silence. My footsteps on the Persian rug were blasphemies. I ran my finger along a row of spines, and it came away clean. No dust. In a house this still, how was there no dust?

It was there, in the suffocating quiet of the library, that my phone buzzed in my pocket. The vibration was so violently out of place I gasped.

Isobel: ELARA. Are you alive? Text me back. One word. Anything.

Tears, hot and sudden, pricked my eyes. The familiar, loud concern in her text was a lifeline thrown into a well. I typed fast, my fingers clumsy.

Me: I’m here. It’s… big. Cold.

Three dots appeared instantly.

Isobel: Cold how? Is he there? Did he try anything?

Me: He’s away. And no. Nothing. It’s just… silent.

Isobel: Silence I can handle. Creepy staff? Secret passages? You’re in a Gothic novel, I swear. Have you found the madwoman in the attic yet?

A hysterical laugh caught in my throat. If only she knew.

Me: No attic. Just a lot of portraits. Of women. They all look… similar.

The dots pulsed for a long time.

Isobel: Similar how? Like, same artist? Or similar like… YOU?

My breath hitched. I looked up, half-expecting Mrs. Danvers to be looming in the doorway, sensing my betrayal of the ‘no discussions’ rule.

Me: Maybe a little. It’s probably nothing. The lighting is bad.

Isobel: Yeah. Bad lighting. That’s it. Listen, I’m doing some digging on your mysterious hubby. The stuff online is boring rich-people fluff. Too clean. I’m going deeper. You just… stay safe. Keep your phone charged.

Me: Isobel, don’t…

Isobel: Too late. Already am. Love you. Text tomorrow.

The screen went dark. I was alone with the silence again, but now it felt charged, dangerous. Isobel was poking a bear, and I was locked in its den.

Seeking a distraction, I wandered back toward the main hall. As I passed a tall, narrow window overlooking the side yard, I saw him again. Gabriel. He had stopped working and was just standing, staring at the base of the stone wall. In his hand was not a tool, but a single, pale purple wildflower, a crocus, brave in the gloom. He looked at it, then, slowly, deliberately, his head turned up toward the house. His eyes didn’t find me at the window. They seemed to look at a point just below it… at the foundation.

Then he did a strange thing. He knelt and placed the flower carefully against the gray stone. A tiny splash of color against the relentless gray. An offering. Or a memorial.

A floorboard creaked behind me. I whirled, my heart in my throat.

It was only Mrs. Danvers. “Luncheon is served in the morning room, Miss.” Her gaze slid past me to the window, to the man outside. Her lips pursed. “The groundskeeper is not to be disturbed. He has his work, and you have yours.”

“What is his work?” I asked the question out before I could stop it.

Her cold eyes snapped back to mine. “Tending to what is past. As we all do.”

She led me to a small, sunless room where a single place was set. As I picked at a salad, a strange compulsion took hold. After lunch, instead of returning to my wing, I drifted toward the main gallery, the long hall lined with those portraits. My heart thudded against my ribs. I had to look again.

The women. Catherine (1994). Seraphina (2004). Violet (2014). In the gray afternoon light, their similarities to me were not a trick of bad lighting. They were a punch to the gut. We shared the same arch of the brow, the same set of the jaw. But it was their eyes, scratched out with such vicious force, that held me. What did they see that needed to be erased?

As I stood there, a draft snaked down the corridor, lifting the hair on my arms. It carried a scent, not roses this time, but old paper. And a whisper, so faint it might have been the wind in a distant chimney.

“…find it…”

I spun around. The hall was completely empty. The whisper was. All I could hear was my own heartbeat pounding in my ears. I was really shaken. I quickly hurried back to my wing, where I thought it was safe. As I walked down the corridor that led to my wing I saw something small and metallic lying on the floor. It was caught in a beam of light that came from a window.

I bent down to pick the pocket watch up. The pocket watch was a man's pocket watch. It was old. It was heavy. The pocket watch felt warm when I touched it like someone had been holding the pocket watch recently. The pocket watch had a gold case. The gold case had a special design on it. A tree with thorns is the same tree with thorns that I had seen before. My thumb found the catch, on the pocket watch and I managed to open the pocket watch after a little struggle.

The clock face was all broken, the hands stuck in place.. If you looked inside the lid you could still see some writing. It was a date one year from now. And under that there was one word: Remember.

From the depths of the house, a clock I had never heard before began to chime the hour, each note slow, heavy, and final.