Positive.
My hands go slack, and the stick clatters to the floor.
I sit there, frozen, for what feels like forever. The world tilts and shifts around me, but I don’t move. I don’t cry. I just stare at the pale-colored wall before me.
Dawn is breaking by the time I finally move. I hide the test in the back of my dresser, wrapping it in an old scarf and burying it beneath a pile of clothes. Secrets don’t last long in this house. Eventually, the truth will come out. But that is the last thing I want to think about now.
The next few hours feel like walking through a nightmare.
In the kitchen, I am completely zoned out of the conversation among other maids. My soul doesn’t feel like it’s in my body; that is, until Marta claps her hands near my face.
“Lia. Are you all right?”
I blink up at her. “What?”
“You’ve been scrubbing the same spot for over fifteen minutes. Are you sick or something?”
Everyone has paused and is looking at me, a few with worried looks on their faces.
“I’m just tired,” I say.
“With everything that has been going on recently, I don’t blame you,” Allegra mutters with a sigh.
Marta pats my shoulders twice before returning to whatever she was doing.
That is when I realize how tense the air is and what exactly they were talking about.
“I was asked to clean that area yesterday,” one of the girls says under her breath as she chops carrots. “I intentionally missed that spot. I might be a cleaner, but that doesn’t mean I clean up after dead bodies.”
Another maid snorts. “It’s been four days, and that place gets cleaned every day.”
“It doesn’t matter,” the former says. “I saw his body dropthere. I just can’t…”
Cassian’s body was found four days ago. I wasn’t there when they pulled him down, but the whole house buzzed with it. You can still feel the fear and tension in every corner of the house.
No one’s allowed to speak openly, but people talk anyway. The guards talk in corners of the house. The maids whisper in the kitchen and backyard. Some say he hanged himself. Others say it wasn’t like that, that his neck was broken before his body was strung up.
I’ve always known we lived amongst murderers. We lived in an estate that belonged to a family soaked in blood. But this… it is different. I feel it in my gut. The Romanos… and the Morettis and whoever else they are involved with deal in secret. Death has never been brandished so publicly in this house before.
“I heard even his family didn’t give him a proper burial,” Allegra whispers with wide eyes.
“His death was shameful,” another maid adds. “Especially for a seer like him.”
“A seer who couldn’t foresee his own death,” Allegra snorts, but goes quiet when Marta hisses for her to keep her voice down.
My hand tightens around the cloth I’m holding. I remember everything Cassian said to me. About blood. About history. About a prophecy.
My stomach flips again, but this time from panic and fear.
“He was a madman,” Paula, who has been quiet since the conversation started, says. “Always going around saying things no one could understand. What I don’t get is why he would kill himself here, in the Romano estate.”
The kitchen goes quiet for a while, but my brain is anything but that. It’s roaring with my unending thoughts. A part of me briefly wonders when Paula will realize something is missing from her bathroom. Another part of me ponders over her last statement.
WhywasCassian’s body found here, of all places?
Why was he here the night before? Why did he follow me to the cellar? How did he know where to find me?
I grab the counter until my knuckles turn white, resisting the urge to rub my stomach. My skin is cold, and my body feels weak.
