Chapter 8: The Ledger’s Secret
The yellow pages of the ledger smelled of damp basements and old ink, a heavy, suffocating scent that clung to the back of my throat. I sat at the small wooden table under the swinging bulb long after the muffled sounds of the high-society gala had died away upstairs, turning the fragile, brittle leaves one by one with trembling fingers. Mrs. Gable had locked herself in her office down the hall, leaving me alone with the ghosts of the estate and the quiet ticking of the grandfather clock echoing from the servants' stairwell.
The name at the top of the fragile paper was Sarah Miller, employed as a personal maid to Julianne Vance three years prior. Her handwriting in the marginalia was neat, but the termination date was blank, followed only by a hurried, frantic handwritten note scrawled in the margins: Contract dissolved due to family emergency. Relocated abroad.
Except Sarah Miller hadn't relocated abroad. I knew that now with a sickening certainty in the pit of my stomach. The subsequent pages contained copies of bank transfers routed through complex offshore accounts in Cyprus—payments made monthly to an isolated address in a bleak coastal town in Dorset. Digging deeper into the manila envelope Mrs. Gable had provided, I found a faded photograph: Sarah standing in the very same grand foyer where I had been bound to the chandelier, smiling shyly at the camera, her fingers clutching a silver locket that looked suspiciously like the one Julianne wore around her neck every single evening like a shield.
My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. Every single name in that ledger was a person who had vanished the moment they saw too much or endured too much under Julianne's reign.
Suddenly, the brass door latch clicked. I froze, my breath catching in my throat, and quickly shoved the incriminating papers beneath my spare white apron just as the heavy timber door creaked open.
Dominic stood in the doorway, his tall frame nearly filling the low-ceilinged passage. He had discarded his formal tuxedo jacket; his white shirt sleeves were rolled neatly to his elbows, revealing the dark, intricate ink of tattoos winding up his forearms. He looked entirely out of place in the cramped, utilitarian servant’s quarters, yet utterly dominant, his piercing grey eyes scanning the tiny room before resting entirely on me.
“You’re awake,” he stated, his voice a low rumble that vibrated right through the old floorboards.
May you like
“I had paperwork to finish, Mr. Mercer,” I replied, keeping my hands flat against the wooden table to hide my shaking fingers.
Dominic took a slow, deliberate step inside, his sharp gaze dropping instantly to the edge of the manila envelope sticking out from beneath my apron. A heavy, electric silence settled between us, thick with unspoken questions and the dangerous weight of secrets neither of us could afford to keep.
