Chapter One: Scrub
1255 Words
POV: Sera
"Scrub."
I whispered it to myself because it helped. If I said it out loud, my hands kept moving even when my brain had long since stopped cooperating.
"Scrub."
The eastern corridor floors were already clean. I knew that. Calla Ashford knew that too, which was exactly why she had made me do them again.
My fingers had split somewhere around the second hour. I knew because the soapy water had stung when I first dipped the brush back in. Now it didn't, which meant the skin around the cracks had gone numb and I was choosing to call that a mercy.
I heard footsteps behind me and did not look up. Looking up was rarely worth what came after.
"That's enough, child." Mira, the head maid. Her voice was low and careful the way it always was when she was trying not to draw attention to either of us. "I'll finish the last stretch."
Something loosened in my chest.
Then a sharp crack split the air and my head snapped sideways.
I dropped the brush. It clattered against the stone. I pressed my lips together and said nothing.
Calla Ashford stood behind me. Silk gown. Eyes moving over me the way someone looked at something they had stepped in.
"She didn't ask for help." She looked at Mira. "Did she?"
Mira went still.
I reached down and picked up the brush. "I'm sorry. It won't happen again."
"No." Calla crouched until her face was level with mine. Expensive perfume. The kind that cost more than I earned in a month. "It won't. Because you're going to finish every inch of this floor yourself. And then the corridor outside the east parlor."
"Yes," I said.
She studied my face looking for something to react to. I gave her nothing. I had learned a long time ago that the fastest way to end these moments was to empty my face completely. No tears. No anger. Nothing she could use.
She straightened and walked away.
Mira waited until the footsteps faded. Then she moved to stand beside me and spoke quietly enough that I almost missed it.
"I'm sorry she did that."
"It's fine."
"It isn't."
I dipped the brush back into the bucket. The water was grey and cold. "It doesn't hurt anymore."
She was quiet for a moment. "That's not a good thing, Sera."
She was right. There was nothing to do with her being right, so I let it sit between us and kept scrubbing.
She left me to it eventually. She always did. Not because she didn't care, but because neither of us could change the situation we were both stuck inside.
Six years I had been with the Ashford pack. I came at fifteen when my grandfather died and left me with no one. They had taken me in the way people took in stray animals. With conditions. With the unspoken understanding that my place was not guaranteed.
At sixteen I had been matched to a fated mate.
For one night I had believed things might be different.
Then Caden Ashford stood in front of the entire pack at the coming-of-age ceremony, looked at me, and said the words that unmade me.
I reject you.
He had said it calmly. Like it cost him nothing.
A rejection inside a pack did not just end a bond. It ended everything attached to you. Your rank, your standing, the way people looked at you in the hallway, and then the way they stopped looking at you at all. I went from a girl with a possible future to the pack's cautionary tale overnight, and I had been scrubbing floors ever since.
I finished the eastern corridor. Then I started on the one outside the east parlor.
By the time I finished, the light through the high windows had changed. Late afternoon. My back ached from my neck to my tailbone. I carried the bucket to the utility room, emptied it, rinsed the brush, and hung it where it belonged.
Then I stood in the small space between the shelf and the wall and breathed for a moment where no one could see me do it.
I was still standing there when Mira found me at the kitchen table an hour later, a bowl of soup in front of me that I hadn't asked for and a heel of bread beside it.
"There's talk in the upper halls," she said, keeping her back to me while she worked the stove.
"There's always talk."
"Different talk today." She paused. "The Lycan King is coming. For an alliance. He arrives in two days and the whole house is being prepared."
I looked down at my soup. Lycan King. That meant politics and banquets and every servant in the house working double hours until he left. More floors. More rooms. More chances to be invisible in the background of something that had nothing to do with me.
"I'll start on the guest wing tomorrow," I said.
Mira turned and looked at me. Something moved across her face that I couldn't read. "Eat first," she said softly.
So I ate.
The guest wing took most of the next morning. I worked from the far end inward, the way Mira had taught me. Dust on the sills, ash in the grates, linen to change, floors to sweep before mopping. I moved through each room quietly and left nothing behind except clean surfaces.
The last room was larger than the others. Corner room, two windows, heavier furniture. A fireplace already swept by someone else. Clearly the room being prepared for the king himself. I changed the linen, swept the floor, wiped down the surfaces near the window.
Outside, the courtyard was busy. Stable hands, guards at the outer gate, a cart being unloaded near the kitchen entrance.
I was pulling the door shut behind me when I nearly walked into someone coming around the corner.
I stepped back. "I'm sorry."
The man steadied himself against the wall. Tall. Broad through the shoulders. Dark traveling clothes, the practical kind, not decorative. He was not one of ours. I knew that immediately, though I couldn't have explained how.
He looked down the corridor, then back toward the staircase, then at me.
"East courtyard. Which way?"
His voice was direct. Not unkind, not warm. Just direct.
I pointed back the way I had come, then gestured left toward the staircase that opened near the side passage to the courtyard.
He followed my hand with his eyes and nodded once.
I stepped aside to let him pass.
"You work here?" he asked.
I turned back. He had stopped a few steps away and was looking at me with an expression I couldn't immediately place. Not curiosity exactly. Something more careful than that.
"Yes," I said.
He held my gaze for a moment longer than the question required.
Then his eyes shifted, just slightly, the way a person's did when something caught them off guard. His jaw tightened. He looked at me like he was trying to place something he almost recognized but couldn't quite reach.
He opened his mouth.
Then Mira's voice came sharp from the far end of the corridor. "Sera. They need you in the linen room."
I looked away from him, picked up my bucket, and walked toward her without looking back.
But I felt his eyes follow me all the way to the end of the corridor.
And I did not know why that made it harder to breathe.
- Writer
