Chapter 3
The factory floor grew bitterly cold as the storm outside began to clear, leaving behind a damp, heavy stillness. Aurelia straightened her posture, the shock in her eyes hardening into a cold, lethal resolve. She tucked the scrap of lace safely into the inner pocket of her velvet dress, her gaze locking onto the far end of the long room where the manager’s glass-walled office overlooked the machinery. Silas Cross, a heavy-set man with grease-stained cuffs and a permanent sneer, was watching them through the smudged window, sensing that the dynamic between the city’s wealthiest patron and her lowest-paid laborer had fundamentally shifted.
"Stay here," Aurelia commanded quietly, though it sounded less like an order and more like a protective instinct she didn't yet know how to wield.
"I don't take orders from you," Eleanor retorted, though she didn't move. Her legs were too weak from a fourteen-hour shift without food.
"You will," Aurelia replied without malice. "Because if what I suspect is true, every brick of this mill, every ledger in that office, and every coin in Cross's pocket rightfully belongs to you."
Aurelia turned sharply, her emerald dress rustling like dry leaves as she marched toward the elevated office. She did not knock. She threw the heavy oak door open with a resounding crash that rattled the glass panes. Silas Cross scrambled out of his leather swivel chair, hastily wiping a smudge of tobacco from his chin.
"Lady Sterling! I trust there isn't a problem with the production quotas? We’ve been running the steam engines at maximum capacity to meet the seasonal export—"
"Shut your mouth, Silas," Aurelia interrupted, her voice dangerously quiet. She stepped into the cramped office, trapping him against his mahogany desk. "Open the 1898 intake ledgers. The private ones. Not the sanitized tax records you send to the board."
Silas blinked, his small, pig-like eyes darting nervously toward the door where Eleanor stood watching. "My lady, those records are confidential. They involve the charity wards, the municipal placement programs..."
"Open them," Aurelia repeated, drawing a small silver-plated pistol from the velvet pouch hanging at her waist. She laid it calmly on the desk, right beside his open inkwell. "Or I will have the magistrate seize the entire property by dawn, and you will spend the rest of your miserable life breaking granite at the state penitentiary."
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Silas swallowed hard, his bravado evaporating instantly. He reached into his bottom drawer, pulled out a heavy leather-bound book covered in thick dust, and slammed it onto the desk. The pages were yellowed and brittle, filled with neat, ruthless columns of names, dates, and coin amounts.
Aurelia flipped the pages back, her gloved fingers tracing the frantic ink entries of a winter twenty years past.
