Lorelai dragged the cloth across the tabletop in slow, absent circles, the same patch of wood she had already wiped twice without noticing. The house around her hummed with a frantic, unfamiliar energy extra maids moving in clusters through the corridors, florists repositioning arrangements for the third time, the distant clatter of preparation bleeding through every wall and floor. It had been two days since the announcement, and the ringing in her ears had not stopped once.
Today was the day.
She had heard the details in fragments, pieced together from whispered conversations in the laundry and the kitchen. The Varkis cars would arrive tonight. The ceremony would take place at their mansion on their grounds, by their rules. The only Draven presence permitted would be the officiant, sent to confirm the marriage had occurred and report back. No family. No witnesses who loved her. Rose would walk into that house alone, and whatever happened after was no longer Draven business.
Lorelai's cloth stilled against the table.
"Lora!"
She turned. A young maid stood in the doorway, slightly breathless, already half-turned to leave.
"The head maid says you're to collect the laundry from the laundry room and bring it up to Master Atlas's quarters. You'll be serving him directly from now on."
Lorelai blinked. "I'm sorry, what?"
But the girl was already gone, footsteps fading quickly down the corridor as though she had delivered a grenade and wanted distance from the blast.
Lorelai stood holding her cleaning cloth and stared at the empty doorway.
She had only just been reassigned to the basement rotation at the start of the month. New duties, new floors, the kind of quiet, invisible work she preferred, low enough in the house that she rarely crossed paths with anyone who could make her life difficult. And now, with no warning and no explanation, the head maid had reshuffled everything and sent someone else to deliver the news rather than telling her directly.
Odd, she thought. But odd things happened in this house every hour, and questioning them rarely ended well.
She set down the cloth, collected the fresh laundry from the room below, and made her way upstairs.
She knocked at Atlas's door twice. Waited. Silence.
She pressed her ear briefly to the wood nothing and eased the door open with one hand, the stack of clean sheets balanced against her hip with the other. The room beyond was dim and still, curtains half-drawn against the afternoon light. At a glance, empty.
The tension in her shoulders dropped a fraction.
She crossed to the bed, set the fresh sheets on the chair beside it, and began stripping the old ones pulling the corners free, bundling the linen efficiently, the movements so practiced they required no thought. She shook out the first clean sheet and let it billow down across the mattress, smoothing it toward the edges.
The door clicked shut behind her. The sound was soft. She spun around, "Master."
Something slammed into her from the side, a body, solid and fast, and her back hit the bedpost hard enough to knock the word clean out of her mouth, clamping her against a chest like a wall, lifting her half off the floor.
'What? who '
She didn't think. Her elbow drove back on pure instinct, hard, and connected with something solid. A grunt close to her ear, hot breath against her temple and the grip faltered just enough. She twisted her torso violently, nails raking out at whatever she could reach. Fabric first, then skin. She felt it open under her fingers, felt the warmth of it, and she dug deeper, dragging her nails down as hard as she could.
'Let go let go LET GO.'
A hiss of pain from behind her. Good. She stamped her heel down with everything she had, threw her weight sideways, and her other hand flew up to the arm locked across her chest, fingers scrabbling over the wrist, finding the joint, wrenching it backward with both hands until she felt something give.
For one wild, lurching second, the grip loosened.
'Run! The door is right there, go.'
Then the cloth came down.
It hit her face from the front, pressed over her nose and mouth with a flat, merciless palm behind it, cutting off the scream that had been climbing her throat. She screamed anyway, a muffled, desperate sound that went nowhere, swallowed by the fabric and the silence of the room, too thick to carry, too small to reach the corridor. She screamed again, louder, felt her own voice vibrating uselessly against the cloth.
'Someone help me. Someone please '
The smell reached her before anything else. Sweet. Wrong. Chemical and thick, coating the inside of her nostrils, sliding down into her lungs with every panicked breath she couldn't stop herself from taking.
'Don't breathe. Don't breathe it in.'
She couldn't not breathe. Her body wouldn't let her.
'Am I dying? Is this... is this how...'
Her legs kicked out against nothing. Her heel caught something a shin, the edge of the bed frame, she couldn't tell and the impact registered as distant, almost theoretical. The scream that rose in her came out as a muffled. She hated that no one would hear it.
'I am not going to die in this room.'
Her fingers slowed.
'This isn't right. Something is wrong with my hands.' She looked down at them in her mind and could not find them. They were still moving she thought they were still moving but the feedback had gone quiet, like a wire cut somewhere between intention and action.
'Stay awake. Stay.' The ceiling tilted.
The light through the half-drawn curtains bled outward, gold smearing into white, edges dissolving. The bedpost she had hit her back against seemed very far away now. The fresh sheets she had laid out glowed faintly in her fading vision, smooth, white, perfectly still.
'Someone will notice I'm gone.'
The thought was almost comforting.
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