Chapter 2
The marble floor felt like ice beneath Eleanor’s knees, though the grand hall was sweltering with the heat of a hundred candles. She kept her hands clamped over her face, her fingers digging into her own skin as if she could physically push away the reality that had just materialized in front of her. The velvet of her dark blue dress pooled uselessly around her, stained by the dust of the floor she had forced others to clean.
Vincent stood entirely motionless. The gold medallion necklace he wore—an artifact he had believed for thirty years was the exclusive crest of his aristocratic paternal lineage—seemed to burn against his chest. He reached out with a trembling hand, his fingers hovering inches above Clara’s shoulder before he pulled back, terrified that his touch might cause further pain to a body he had inadvertently allowed to be battered under his own roof.
"Where did you get that?" Vincent demanded, his voice dropping from a shout to a low, dangerous growl that commanded absolute obedience.
Clara winced as she shifted her weight, the movement pulling at the raw welts across her back. She kept her tear-filled eyes fixed on Vincent, sensing not the cruelty of her mistress, but a strange, terrifying kinship in the man’s haunted gaze.
"My mother’s name was Sarah," Clara murmured, her voice raspy from hours of crying and lack of water. "She worked in the south wing of this very estate over twenty-five years ago. Before the old master passed away and left everything to the Sterling Trust. She left me this necklace in a small wooden box before she passed away in the charity hospital. She told me it was the only proof of who I was, and that one day, the doors of this house would open for me again."
Eleanor lowered her hands just enough to reveal eyes wide with hysteria. "She is lying, Vincent! It’s a common forgery! A cheap trinket bought in some back alley to infiltrate our family and steal our inheritance! Look at her! She’s a servant, a peasant with dirt under her fingernails! You cannot possibly believe the word of a beaten animal over your own wife!"
Vincent turned his head slowly, looking down at Eleanor with a gaze so devoid of warmth that it made the woman shudder. The contrast between them was absolute: Eleanor, draped in aristocratic velvet yet reduced to a pathetic, shivering mess on the floor; and Vincent, the pillar of the community, whose very identity had just been detonated by a single piece of stamped gold.
"My mother was also named Sarah," Vincent said, his voice terrifyingly calm. "And she vanished from this estate the winter before I was legally adopted by the senior Sterlings. I was told she died of a fever in the village. But she never had a grave. I looked for it for ten years, Eleanor. You told me it was a waste of time to search for a ghost."
"I only wanted to protect you from common squalor!" Eleanor hissed, her voice rising in desperate pitch. "We built this life together, Vincent! The banks, the board seats, the name! You throw it all away for a bleeding maid?"
Vincent ignored her entirely. He knelt beside Clara, ignoring the fine fabric of his green velvet suit brushing against the blood-stained marble. Gently, with infinite care, he reached out and took the small gold medallion in his palm, comparing its weight and engraving to his own. They were identical, cast from the same mold, bearing the same secret maker’s mark on the reverse side.
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Clara flinched instinctively, expecting a blow, but Vincent’s touch was feather-light. He looked into her bruised face, seeing the unmistakable contour of a family resemblance in the set of her jaw and the shape of her eyes.
"You are not going to clean this floor anymore, Clara," Vincent whispered, his jaw tight. "And neither is she."
