Chapter 3: Ghosts of the Household
The young woman stared back at me, a sudden, sharp panic distorting her features as she registered the intense, erratic change in my demeanor. She took a hesitant step backward into the slush, her arms tightening protectively around the infant as if she were preparing to bolt back into the dark mouth of the valley road.
“Who are you?” I whispered, my voice a jagged rasp that was barely audible above the drumming rain. “Tell me the truth… who was your biological mother?”
For a long, agonizing ten seconds, she stood frozen on the edge of the asphalt, her eyes darting between my face and the dark willow trees behind her like a trapped animal searching for a hole in the fence. But before she could formulate a retreat, the infant beneath the blanket began to cry—a thin, reedy, and thoroughly exhausted sound that signaled its tiny system was running out of time.
The sound seemed to break the last remaining pillars of her reckless courage. The defiance drained from her shoulders, and she slumped slightly against the stone pillar, the heavy tears finally spilling over her eyelids to mix with the rainwater tracking down her cheeks.
“My mother’s name was Elena,” she said, her voice fracturing completely into a sob. “She passed away in the municipal ward last week.”
The name hit my chest with the physical force of an iron deadbolt sliding into place.
Elena. To the rest of the world, it was nothing more than a common name from a forgotten era. But inside the walls of Blackwood Manor, that name was a repository of an ancient, monstrous family scandal. Twenty-three years ago, Elena had been the primary head maid assigned to the residential wings of the estate—a brilliant, quiet young woman from the valley whose presence had systematically rewritten the script of our household.
She was the woman my younger brother, Julian Blackwood, had loved with a fierce, unyielding intensity that defied every single rule of our aristocratic lineage. She was the woman our tyrannical father, Marcus Blackwood, had sworn had stolen a fortune from the family vault before vanishing into the night in the dead of winter. It was a brutal, administrative eviction so complete that every single servant inside the estate had been strictly forbidden from ever articulating her name again under penalty of immediate termination.
And according to the official medical logs that my father had filed with the state registry before sunrise on the night of her disappearance, Elena’s newborn daughter had been formally reported dead due to premature delivery complications.
I stared at the red crescent birthmark on the young woman’s shoulder, then down at the shivering infant in her arms, and finally back into the wide gray eyes of the stranger standing in my mud.
“That child…” I choked out, my throat completely dry.
May you like
The woman pulled the wet blanket tighter around the bundle, her voice dropping into a defensive whisper. “What about him?”
My entire expression hollowed out with an absolute, terrifying disbelief, because I had seen that exact same crescent birthmark once before in my life. I had seen it nine years ago, carved into the pale skin of my brother’s true wife on the identical night she gave birth to the family’s only legitimate male heir—the baby boy who had supposedly been reduced to ash during the horrific nursery fire that had destroyed the eastern wing of the estate.
