THE MAFIA'S FAVORITE MAID

CHAPTER 2

The weeks blurred together until I could no longer tell one exhausted day from the next.

I worked. I slept in short, restless pieces. I handed Tyler every dollar that was not needed for the tiny room above the laundry and a single meal a day. He still kissed my forehead every Friday and told me I was saving his life. Sometimes he looked tired. Sometimes he looked almost happy. I told myself that meant the debt was getting smaller.

I never asked to see proof.

One rainy Thursday the restaurant manager told me they were cutting shifts. The gas station had already reduced my hours. The hotel only needed me on weekends. For the first time since I left college, the envelopes I gave Tyler were thinner. He noticed.

“They’re getting impatient, Aria,” he said that night, voice low and urgent. “I need more. Just for a little while longer. Please.”

I stared at the wet pavement and felt something inside me crack a little more. I nodded anyway.

The next morning I saw a handwritten notice taped to the window of a small employment agency near the bus stop: Live-in domestic staff needed. Large private estate. Room and board provided. Immediate start.

Room and board. A roof that did not leak. Food that did not come from a vending machine. The chance to save more money, faster.

I walked inside before I could talk myself out of it.

The woman behind the desk looked me over—my cheap clothes, the dark circles under my eyes, the way my hands still smelled faintly of cleaning chemicals—and asked only a few questions. Experience with service work. Willingness to live on the property. Ability to keep quiet about the household. I answered everything honestly. She made a short phone call, wrote an address on a card, and told me to present myself the following afternoon.

“Be clean. Be polite. Don’t ask unnecessary questions,” she said. “If they like you, you’ll start immediately.”

I went.

The estate sat behind tall black iron gates at the end of a long private road. Even from the outside it looked like something from another world—wide lawns, a fountain, a mansion that seemed to swallow the gray sky. A guard checked my name against a list, then waved me through.

An older woman in a neat gray uniform met me at the side entrance. Her name was Mrs. Lang. She had kind eyes and a voice that expected obedience without raising itself.

“You’ll have a small room on the third floor with the other live-in staff,” she said as she walked me through a back hallway. “Meals are taken in the servants’ kitchen. You will be assigned daily tasks. You will not enter the private wings unless instructed. You will not speak to the master of the house unless he speaks to you first. Is that clear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She studied me for a moment longer, then gave a small nod. “Good. Most girls don’t last. The ones who do learn to stay invisible.”

My room was narrow but clean. A single bed, a small wardrobe, a window that looked out over the rear gardens. It was more than I had had in months. I sat on the edge of the mattress and let myself breathe for the first time in what felt like forever.

That evening I was given a simple black uniform with a white collar and told to help serve dinner in the formal dining room. I kept my eyes down the way Mrs. Lang had instructed. I carried trays. I refilled glasses. I moved carefully so the china would not make a sound.

At the head of the long table sat a man I had never seen before.

He was tall even while seated, dressed in a dark suit that looked expensive without trying. His hair was black, his expression unreadable. He spoke only a few quiet words to the men seated near him. He never once glanced in my direction. To him I was simply another pair of hands moving in the background.

I preferred it that way.

When the meal ended I helped clear the table in silence. Later, in the servants’ kitchen, one of the other maids whispered that the man at the head of the table was Mr. Moretti—the owner of the estate, and a man most people in the city knew better than to speak about loudly.

I filed the name away and thought of nothing else except the envelope I would be able to give Tyler at the end of the week.

For the first time in a long while, I felt something close to relief.

I had a place to sleep. I had steady work. I was still useful.

I did not know then that the quiet, unremarkable girl carrying trays in the background was about to become something far more dangerous than she had ever planned to be.

But that night, as I lay in the narrow bed and listened to the rain against the window, all I felt was tired gratitude.

I had survived another day.