The Keeper's Forbidden Housemaid

Mira POV The rain had been chasing me for three days, and I was tired of running from it. I stood at the end of the gravel drive with my one suitcase and my last nineteen dollars folded into my shoe, staring up at a house that looked like it had been built to keep something in or keep something out. Blackwood Manor. The name alone should have sent me back to the bus station. Instead, I walked toward the door like it owed me something. Three days ago, a man named Rourke had knocked on my apartment door with two men built like refrigerators standing behind him, and he'd smiled the way people smile right before they hurt you. You have until Friday, Mira. I didn't have until Friday. I had until whenever the wind changed and someone decided an unpaid debt was worth more than my kneecaps. So when I saw the ad crumpled in the bottom of a diner trash can, Live-in housekeeper wanted. Discretion required. Generous compensation. Isolated estate, I didn't think about the word isolated the way I should have. I thought about the word generous. The door opened before I knocked. He was younger than I expected, and colder. Dark hair, darker eyes, a jaw that looked like it had forgotten how to unclench. He looked at my suitcase, my shoes worn through at the toe, my face that I hadn't bothered to fix in three days, and something in his expression flickered, not pity. Recognition. Like he knew exactly what desperation looked like because he'd worn it himself once. "You're here about the position," he said. Not a question. "Yes." "Do you have references?" "No." "Family who'll come looking for you?" The question should have frightened me. It didn't, not yet. "No." He studied me a moment longer, and I made myself hold still under it, the way you hold still when a dog is deciding whether you're a threat. Then he stepped back and let the door swing wide, and I understood that some kind of test had already happened and I'd passed it, though I couldn't have said what it was. "Cade Blackwood," he said, leading me down a hallway lined with portraits whose eyes had all been very carefully painted to follow you. "I own the house. I'll expect you to keep it, and to keep out of things that aren't yours to keep." "That's a strange way to describe housework." "It's an honest one." He stopped outside a study with a desk the size of a boat and turned to face me fully for the first time. "The last three maids left in body bags." I want to say I laughed, or that I turned and walked back out into the rain. I didn't. I stood there and did the math I'd been doing for three days straight... hunger against fear, fear against Rourke's men, Rourke's men against whatever waited inside these walls and the walls won. "Do you still want the job?" he asked, and there was no cruelty in it. Just a terrible, patient honesty, like he was giving me one last chance to be smart. "Yes," I said. Something crossed his face... edisappointment, maybe, that I hadn't run. Or maybe it was something closer to relief. He didn't explain which, and I didn't ask. He had me sign the contract at that enormous desk, my hand shaking just slightly as I pressed the pen to paper. The ink came out black as the wood paneling, black as his eyes, black as the rainclouds still gathering outside the window. I signed my name the way you sign your name to anything you can't afford to read too closely. "Your room is upstairs. East hall, second door," he said, already turning away, already finished with me. "Don't unpack anything you're not prepared to leave behind quickly." I followed the housekeeper, a thin grey woman named Mrs. Harlow who moved through the halls like she was trying not to wake something, up a staircase that groaned under every step. My room was small, clean, and colder than the hallway. I set my suitcase on the bed and didn't open it. That was when I heard it. A scream distant, muffled by stone and distance, coming from somewhere deep in the house. Mrs. Harlow didn't flinch. She didn't even pause in smoothing the blanket at the foot of my bed. "What was that?" I asked. "The house settling," she said, in a voice that made it clear this was a rehearsed answer, one she'd given before, to someone else, in this exact room. I didn't believe her. I don't think she expected me to. I sat on the edge of the bed long after she'd gone, listening to the rain finally catch up with me, drumming against a window that didn't quite fit its frame. I thought about Rourke, about the nineteen dollars in my shoe, about a house with three dead maids and a man who told me so before I'd even set down my bag. I signed my name in ink as black as the manor itself. But it was the scream that would haunt me. Not because it was terrifying. Because it sounded familiar.