Chapter 5
That invisible shackle tightened around Ainsley's throat once more.
She bit down hard on her cracked, bleeding lips, tasting the metallic sweetness flooding her mouth. Every last shred of defiance, every ounce of hatred—all of it was forced back down.
For the Hopper family, she could not fight back.
"If you understand, then get to work." Elijah didn't spare her another glance. He wrapped his arm around Sabrina and headed upstairs. "Before tonight, every corner of this house—spotless."
A servant handed her a rag and a bucket. The polished floor tiles reflected her wrecked, broken figure back at her.
Her plaster-encased legs couldn't bear weight at all. The slightest pressure sent bone-deep agony drilling through her. The sutured wounds split open instantly, blood seeping through the gaps in the casts, drop by slow drop.
Blood soaked through her thin hospital gown, clinging to her skin—cold and agonizing.
Ainsley had no choice.
She bent her knees slowly and dropped hard onto the marble floor.
The dull thud of kneecaps striking stone sent a spasm ripping through her entire body.
The freezing tiles seeped through her torn clothing, numbing her limbs. She hunched forward, gripping the rag in both hands, and began wiping the floor inch by inch.
Every time she shifted her knees, the torn wounds ripped wider. Blood flowed steadily, sliding down her legs and dripping onto the pristine white tiles.
One drop. Two drops. Then too many to count.
By the time she finished the sprawling foyer on her knees, blood trailed every inch of ground she'd crossed.
As she dragged herself along the hallway toward the staircase, her legs had gone completely numb. Sweat and tears smeared across Ainsley's face in a slick, indistinguishable mess.
From the bedroom upstairs came the faint sound of Sabrina's coy laughter and Elijah's low, murmured replies.
Their voices were intimate. Tender. Unbearable.
That had been her place once. The place she had loved for eight years, guarded for three.
Now she was the lowest kind of slave, dragging shattered bones through a trail of her own blood, scrubbing their house on her knees, stripped of every dignity.
The sky darkened by degrees.
Every floor in the mansion had been wiped clean on her knees. Not a speck of dust remained.
But across those vast floors, her warm blood spread in winding, crisscrossing trails.
The smell of iron and faint antiseptic hung in the frigid air.
Ainsley finally collapsed at the end of the second-floor hallway, the wounds beneath her leg casts a mangled ruin of flesh and blood—completely torn open, raw and festering.
She braced herself against the cold floor and lifted her head just slightly, staring at the closed door of the master bedroom.
The last faint light in her eyes went out. All that remained was a hatred so deep it burned through bone.
Elijah. Sabrina.
If there was a future, she would make them pay in blood for every drop they'd taken.
The mansion lay in dead silence past midnight. Only the hallway sconces cast their dim, cold halos, making the smell of drying blood on the floor feel all the more savage.
Ainsley pressed her palms against the freezing floor, her fingertips clawing at the cool stone tiles as she dragged her broken body upright, inch by agonizing inch.
Damp. Not a trace of sunlight. A world apart from the warm luxury of the master suite upstairs.
She hauled her heavy, useless legs forward in a slow crawl. Every inch felt like a blade peeling another layer from her already ravaged body.
Just as she reached the second-floor corner and was about to turn toward the maid's quarters, the door to the guest bedroom opened softly.
Warm golden light spilled into the hallway. Ainsley looked up instinctively, and her gaze froze.
Sabrina was nestled in Elijah's arms, her hands looped intimately around his waist, her head resting against his chest. Her expression was lazy, coy, utterly content.
She wore an oversized white men's dress shirt that barely covered her thighs.
It was Elijah's. And if Ainsley remembered correctly, it was one she had given him.
Elijah held Sabrina by the waist with one arm, his deep voice carrying an indulgent smile. "Easy. You just caught a chill—don't trip."
Sabrina's fingertips traced his collar playfully. "Elijah, I want to stay in the master bedroom again tonight..."
"Okay."
One word. So gentle it could drown a person.
He looked down at the woman in his arms, his eyes full of patience and adoration.
The master bedroom. That had been her and Elijah's place. How could they—there—
Ainsley watched helplessly as their bodies intertwined and disappeared through the master bedroom door.
An invisible fist crushed her heart. Warm tears slid down in silence.
She didn't know how long she knelt frozen in that cold hallway before the hollow light finally left her eyes. She dragged her broken body into the tiny, pitch-black maid's quarters.
There was no bed. Only a hard, cold plank with a thin, mildew-damp blanket.
She curled up on it, letting her wounds bleed freely, and did not sleep the entire night.
At seven the next morning, the doorbell rang on schedule—Elijah's personal alarm, and the starting bell of another day of suffering.
Ainsley forced her depleted body upright.
After breakfast, Elijah stood in the center of the living room in a custom dress shirt, sleeves rolled to reveal the clean lines of his wrists.
His gaze drifted, cool and detached, to Ainsley in the corner, wiping down the coffee table.
"Nobody cleaned the master bedroom last night. Go upstairs, make the bed, and scrub the room top to bottom."
Ainsley's fingers clenched white-knuckled around the rag.
Her heart seized. The intimate scene from the hallway last night flooded back, slicing through what remained of her sanity over and over.
He knew exactly what that room was—where he and Sabrina had spent the night—and he was ordering her to clean it with her own hands.
It was pure, naked humiliation.
But she had no right to refuse.
The Hopper family's lifeline was still clenched in his fist. Her life had long since stopped belonging to her.
Ainsley lowered her lashes, burying the hatred in her eyes, and nodded in silence.
She pushed open the master bedroom door.
The air still held traces of Elijah's scent—cold, sharp, cedarwood.
The bedding was tangled and creased. The sheets were twisted and sunken. Several long, delicate strands of hair lay scattered across the pillows. Every detail was a testament to last night's intimacy.
Each one drove into her heart like a sharpened blade, carving flesh from bone.
Ainsley bit down on her lower lip until the skin split and bled. Only then did she swallow every emotion back into the pit of her stomach.
She bent forward, enduring the searing agony in her legs, and straightened the rumpled bedding piece by piece. She wiped every corner of the room, erasing those glaring traces one by one with her own hands.
By the time she finished, it was nearly noon.
She went back downstairs to continue scrubbing the living room floor. As she leaned forward to reach a stubborn spot beneath the sofa, a slender figure stepped into view.
