Burgundy and Grey
1532 Words
CHAPTER TEN
The dark was still thick outside the window when my eyes opened.
I lay still for a moment, listening. The mansion breathed around me — the low settle of old walls, the distant hum of something mechanical deep in the basement, the occasional creak of a floorboard somewhere above. I reached for my glasses. Then my hearing aid. The world sharpened and filled.
Four forty-three.
I got up.
If Sera wanted five, I would give her four fifty. I didn't know what I was trying to prove or who I was trying to prove it to.
I dressed in the grey uniform, tied my hair back, and walked out into the corridor before the mansion had fully decided to wake up.
The kitchen was empty when I arrived.
I stood in the doorway for a moment, taking it in without the noise and bodies of yesterday crowding the space. Large. Organized in a way that made sense once you understood the logic of it. I moved to the far counter, found the cleaning cloths where they'd been yesterday, and started wiping down the surfaces.
By the time Sera walked in twenty minutes later, the counters were clean and I had located the coffee and started a pot without being asked.
She stopped when she saw me.
I kept working.
She said nothing. She tied her apron, moved to the stove, and began her own preparations with the efficiency of someone who had done this ten thousand times and expected to do it ten thousand more.
Not a word.
Not a look.
I told myself I hadn't expected anything. I told myself it didn't matter. I focused on the cloth and the surface and the rhythm of the work and kept the other feelings small and manageable in the back of my chest where they couldn't interfere.
The other maids arrived in ones and twos between five and five fifteen. They slotted themselves into their routines without acknowledging me beyond what was strictly necessary. Brie arrived last, her eyes sweeping the kitchen once before landing briefly on me. Something moved in her expression. Not warmth exactly. But not the blankness the others gave me either.
She looked away before I could decide what it was.
Breakfast for the pack was a production. Trays and dishes and timed courses that had to land on tables at specific moments. I was given the jobs that required no explanation and no trust — carrying, washing, restocking. The kind of work that kept your hands busy and your presence irrelevant.
I carried. I washed. I restocked.
I listened.
The maids talked around me like I was furniture. Which meant I learned things. The pack's schedule. Who reported to whom. Which corridors were busy at which hours. The fact that the Alpha ate alone most mornings and hadn't taken breakfast in the main hall in weeks.
The fact that she was coming today.
I caught that in pieces. A lowered voice. A glance toward the door. The way two of the older maids straightened slightly without seeming to mean to.
"She's staying the week," one of them murmured.
The other made a small sound that carried an entire conversation inside it.
I didn't ask who they meant.
I found out an hour later.
I was refilling the bread basket at the far end of the kitchen when the door swung open and the temperature of the room changed.
Not literally. But close enough.
She was tall. Dark haired. The kind of beautiful that looked deliberate, assembled with precision and maintained with effort and weaponized without apology. She wore deep burgundy.
Every maid in the space found something to look at that wasn't her face.
Her eyes moved across the kitchen in a slow sweep. They landed on me and stopped.
I was still holding the bread basket.
She looked at me the way you look at something that has appeared in a space it doesn't belong in.
"You're new," she said.
Her voice was smooth.
.
"Yes," I said.
"What's your name?"
"Lyra."
She let the name sit in the air between us. Then the corner of her mouth moved in something that wasn't quite a smile. "Lyra," she repeated, the way you repeat a word you've already decided you don't like. Her eyes moved over me once more — glasses, hearing aid, grey uniform, bread basket — and then she looked away, done.
"Make sure the coffee is fresh," she said to no one and everyone. "I won't drink yesterday's."
She walked out.
The kitchen exhaled.
I set the bread basket down carefully and went back to work. My hands were steady. I made sure of it. I kept my face even and my movements deliberate and I did not let the burning behind my sternum become anything anyone could see.
Brie appeared beside me at the sink twenty minutes later, her voice dropped low.
"That's Mandy," she said quietly, not looking at me.
"I gathered," I said.
"She comes and goes." Brie scrubbed at a pan with more focus than it required. "Has done for years. The Alpha doesn't — " She stopped. Started again. "Just stay out of her way."
"Is she his mate?" The question came out before I'd decided to ask it.
Brie was quiet for a moment.
"No," she said finally. Then she took her pan and moved away.
The day wore on. More carrying. More washing. More restocking. My feet ached by midafternoon and my lower back had developed a specific complaint that it repeated every time I bent over. I ignored both.
At some point Sera assigned me to the upper corridor — the one that connected the east and west wings on the second floor. Dust the frames, wipe the baseboards, straighten the runner. Simple work. Quiet work. The kind I'd come to prefer because it meant I could think without managing anyone else's opinion of me at the same time.
The corridor was long and lined with framed photographs. Pack history. Gatherings and ceremonies and faces arranged in formal rows. I moved along them slowly, cloth in hand, and looked at each one without knowing what I was looking for.
None of the faces meant anything to me.
I had almost reached the end of the corridor when I heard them.
Voices. Low. Around the corner where the corridor bent toward the private wing.
I stopped.
His voice I recognized immediately. Something in my body recognized it before my mind did, a low pull in my chest like a string being drawn taut.
Hers I recognized too. .
I should have turned back. I knew that even as my feet stayed exactly where they were.
I leaned slightly — just slightly — until the bend in the corridor gave me a sliver of what was around it.
Diego stood with his back to the wall, one arm raised, his hand flat against the stone above Mandy's head. She stood close to him, her fingers curled into the front of his shirt, her face tilted up toward his. She was saying something I couldn't fully catch. Something soft and deliberate. He wasn't smiling but he wasn't pulling away either.
His expression was unreadable.
Hers was not.
I stepped back.
I made it back around the corner and stood in the middle of the corridor with the framed photographs watching me from both sides.
My chest felt strange. Tight in a way I didn't have language for. Not pain exactly. Something adjacent to it.
I pressed my free hand flat against my sternum.
"Stop it," I told myself quietly. "Stop."
I went back to wiping baseboards.
I worked until the light in the corridor went gold and then grey and then dim. Until Sera appeared at the end of the hall and told me I was done for the day with the same flat economy she applied to everything she said to me.
I returned the cloth. Washed my hands. Walked back to my room at the end of the corridor on the ground floor.
I sat on the bed. Removed my glasses. Removed my hearing aid. Let the world go soft and muffled around me.
I thought about Diego's hand flat against the wall above Mandy's head.
I thought about Brie saying no, she's not his mate, and then moving away before I could ask what she was then.
I lay back, put on my hearing aid and stared at the ceiling.
Tomorrow will be the same. Early morning. Grey uniform. Work that kept my hands busy and my presence irrelevant. Sera's silence. The other maids. Mandy's eyes moving over me like I was something that needed categorizing.
I closed my eyes.
Somewhere above me a door opened.
Footsteps in the corridor outside my room. Slowing.
Stopping.
I opened my eyes.
The footsteps didn't continue. They didn't retreat either. They simply stopped, right outside my door, and the silence that followed was the particular kind of silence that has a person inside it.
I sat up slowly.
The silence stretched.
Then the footsteps moved away, unhurried, and faded down the corridor until the mansion swallowed them entirely.
- Writer
