Chapter 2 - The Portrait in the West Wing
"That's impossible," I said, shaking my head so hard a stray lock of hair fell across my eyes. "The employment agency—Mrs. Hess—she vetted me. It was random. I filled out an online form at midnight because I was desperate."
"Nothing in this house is random," Roman replied, turning toward the arched doorway that led to the main hall. "Follow me."
"I'm not going anywhere with you until you explain what kind of sick joke—"
"It's not a joke," Declan interrupted, his voice surprisingly gentle as he stepped past me to pick up the skillet of potatoes I had abandoned. He didn't look at me, but his knuckles were still scarred and bruised. "Just walk with him, Maeve. Trust me, you want to see it with your own eyes before you start screaming."
My legs felt like lead, but curiosity—that stubborn, fatal flaw that kept me alive through two years of grinding poverty—forced me to move. I followed Roman down the cavernous, dimly lit corridor that stretched away from the kitchen. We passed heavy mahogany doors, suits of armor that cast long, skeletal shadows in the morning light, and tall windows streaked with gray rain.
We climbed a grand spiral staircase I hadn't been allowed to clean yet, the Persian runner muffling our footsteps. Roman didn't speak. His back was stiff, every muscle coiled like a spring.
We stopped on the third floor, a part of the house Mrs. Hess had explicitly warned me was off-limits. Roman produced a heavy brass key from his pocket—not a digital card, but an old-fashioned skeleton key—and turned it in a lock that hadn't been used in years.
The door creaked open, releasing the scent of old dust, lavender, and rain.
It was a sitting room, perfectly preserved as if someone had walked out of it yesterday and locked the door behind them. Velvet drapes covered the tall windows, filtering the pale morning light into a soft, amber haze. But it wasn't the furniture that made my breath hitch in my chest.
It was the painting above the marble fireplace.
A young woman with dark, expressive eyes, a sharp, stubborn chin, and thick brown hair pulled back in a loose braid stared down from the canvas. She wore a hunter-green dress that belonged to another decade, and her hands were resting casually on the back of a chair I had scrubbed just yesterday downstairs.
I raised a trembling hand and touched my own chin.
"That's..." I swallowed hard, the room spinning slightly. "That's me. When I was twenty."
"It's Elena," Roman corrected softly, stepping up beside me. "Painted on her eighteenth birthday by our uncle. Look closer at her hands."
I forced myself to look. On her left wrist, half-hidden by the lace cuff of her sleeve, was a faint, jagged white scar shaped like a crescent moon.
I instinctively pulled down the sleeve of my own sweater, pressing my thumb over the exact same scar on my left wrist—a souvenir from a childhood bicycle accident in a backyard in South Boston.
"She told me she got that falling out of a tree," I whispered, the foundation of my entire life crumbling away beneath my feet. "She had a story for everything. Every scar, every city we lived in, every time we had to pack up and move in the middle of the night."
"She wasn't running from bills, Maeve," Roman said, his voice heavy with a grief that had been festering for a quarter of a century. "She was running from our father. And from us."
"Why?" I turned to face him, the tears finally breaking free, hot and angry down my cheeks. "If this was her home, if you all loved her, why did she leave? Why did she raise me in drafty apartments eating instant noodles while her brothers lived in a castle?"
Roman looked away, his jaw tightening as a muscle ticked in his cheek. "Because the night she left, she watched our father put a bullet through our mother's head in this very room."
The silence that followed was absolute. Downstairs, a grandfather clock chimed the hour, its heavy metallic strikes echoing through the hollow corridors like falling stones.
May you like
"She didn't leave because she wanted to," Roman added, his eyes meeting mine, dark and haunted. "She left to keep you alive. And now that you're back under this roof, whoever killed our father is going to realize you've inherited everything she took with her."
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