Chapter 6 Whatever

"Whatever," Josephine said.

Raelith's thumb hovered over the screen. She had expected tears. Begging. Possibly a fainting spell. She had not expected a girl in a loose borrowed dress to look at her phone the way a person looks at a stain on someone else's sleeve.

"Whatever?" Raelith repeated. "Did you not hear me? I have a video of you with Alistair Vance. If Karl sees this, he will throw you out of this house before dinner."

"Then show him."

"You are not afraid?"

"Of a video?" Josephine's eyes flicked from the phone to Raelith's face, unhurried. "No."

Raelith stared. Had the girl not understood? A video like this put a green hat on the third young master of the Veyron family. It was a stain on his name. And his new wife was shrugging it off like a coffee spill.

Unless she did not care about Karl's reputation at all. Unless she hated this marriage and held a grudge.

Raelith's voice rose. "Are you trying to play me for a fool?"

Josephine's face did not change. She answered slowly, one word at a time, with absolute seriousness.

"You are the fool. Your whole family are fools."

For one second the corridor was completely silent.

Raelith opened her mouth and nothing came out. It was such a strange, flat, earnest insult, delivered like a doctor reading a diagnosis, that she did not know whether to laugh or scream.

"I have been in this house far longer than you," she finally hissed. "You think you can walk in with your little certificate and take it? Get out. Get out as far as you can, and take your filthy past with you."

Josephine took a step forward, toward the study door behind Raelith.

Raelith jerked back as if scalded. "What are you doing? Stay away from me! You are trying to steal my phone!"

Josephine stopped. She looked at the woman's wide, bright, very theatrical eyes, and the faint, satisfied glint behind them, and understood exactly what she was seeing. Raelith had planned this. A scream. A scene. A witness running up the stairs to find the new bride looming over a defenseless guest.

I walked into this house three hours ago, she thought, and someone is already building a cage for me.

She smiled.

It was the smallest smile, and it did something to Raelith's face. A flicker of doubt, a half-second of unease. She took another step back, then another, one heel finding the empty edge of the top stair.

She missed it.

There was a short, startled gasp. A scrape of heels. Then Raelith Vane, famous face of half the billboards in Virelia, tumbled down the grand staircase in a flurry of silk and designer lace and landed in a heap on the marble below, utterly silent.

Downstairs, a maid screamed. Another dropped a vase.

Butler Wren appeared in the hall at a speed that did not match his years. He knelt over Raelith, checked her breath, snapped his fingers, and within seconds half the staff was running. Then he lifted his head and looked up.

"Madam. What happened?"

Josephine, leaning one hip against the banister, glanced up from her phone with an expression of perfect, gentle innocence.

"Oh, she fell. By herself. It has nothing to do with me."

Butler wren studied her for a long moment. Her hands were empty of any weapon. Her dress was undisturbed. She had not been within two meters of the woman when it happened. Everything she said was technically true.

He turned away and began issuing orders for a car and a doctor. When he glanced back a minute later, Josephine was still standing in the same spot, scrolling through her phone as if she had all the time in the world.

That old phone probably did not even have 4G. What could possibly be so interesting on it?

Butler wren sighed. He had thought, in the first hour, that the new madam was gentle and kind. Now Miss Vane lay unconscious at the foot of the stairs, and the madam was playing on her phone. A cold-hearted girl, then. A pity.

He did not know the first thing about what she was doing.

What Josephine was doing took about ninety seconds.

Raelith's phone had slid out of her hand and spun under a console table, and it was still connected to the Veyron estate's network. A house this large kept its servers soft in the middle. She had spotted the weak point the moment she crossed the threshold, because the last time she had stood in a house like this, a man named Reginald Titan had bragged about his security every day and been robbed blind by a nineteen-year-old with a laptop.

A few lines of code. A handshake. A quiet door opening.

There it was. The video, saved locally and mirrored in the cloud. She checked the log before she touched it.

Received once, from a number with no name attached, at seven forty that morning. Not forwarded. Not shared. Not yet.

Seven forty. Before the car left the Titan house.

Seraphina.

She did not need proof. She only needed one mistake from her, one thread to pull, and she had just been handed the end of it. She noted the number, burned it into her memory, and tapped once.

The video vanished. Then the backup. Then the cache. Then every trace of the file ever having existed, down to the thumbnail, down to the cloud drive, down to the deleted-items folder where careful people thought things went to die.

Clean. Quiet. Nothing left.

Upstairs, behind a locked door, Karl Veyron watched a screen that floated in the air above his bed.

On it was a live feed of Josephine, standing at the top of the stairs. He moved two fingers, and her phone screen swelled to fill the display. He had not been tracking her. He had been watching the whole house, the way he always did. But when the new madam's hand went still on her phone and the lines of code began to scroll, he sat up a little straighter.

A hacker. His new wife was a hacker.

And a good one. She was cleaning out Raelith Vane's phone like someone emptying a drawer, calm and fast and entirely without wasted motion.

"Darian."

The door opened at once. Darian Voss stepped in. "Young master?"

"Why is 'hacker' not in the investigation report?"

Darian blinked. "According to Silas Thorn's findings, the young lady's computer skills were limited to drawing and writing. Nothing more." He glanced at the screen and froze. "Young master, I will have it re-investigated immediately."

"Do." Karl's voice was mild. On the screen, a tiny progress bar finished. "Miss Vane?"

"She fell down the stairs. The doctor is on his way."

"She will live." Karl did not look away from the feed. "Send someone to see to her. The old man will ask."

"Yes, young master."

"And Darian. Tell Butler wren to give Fenna to the madam."

Darian went completely still.

Fenna was not a maid, or a bodyguard, or a driver, although she was all three. She was nineteen years old, built like a sparrow, and could take down a room of armed men without raising her pulse. The young master had kept her at his side for years. Darian had always believed he was training her into something very sharp.

To hand her to the new wife was not a gift. It was a statement.

"Is there a problem?" Karl asked.

"No." Darian bowed. "No problem at all. I will speak to the butler."

When the door had closed, Karl rewound the feed to the corridor. He watched Josephine's face when Raelith sneered, Get out as far as you can. He watched the warmth drain out of her until she looked carved in ice.

And then he watched her say, with that serious, earnest face, Your whole family are fools, and something in his chest, small and unfamiliar, shifted.

He found that he was smiling.

A medic's hands. A hacker's mind. A face that changed with every person she met, soft for the butler and frost for the actress. And a seam running through all of it, something that did not fit the report on his desk.

What are you hiding, Josephine Titan?

And why did you choose me?

Josephine went back to her room, locked the door, and checked every surface. No cameras in the walls. No microphones in the vents. She sat down at the old desk, then at the new laptop, and layered a second firewall over the first until the estate's network could not sneeze without her permission.

Lunch was served on a silver tray in the dining room. Karl did not appear, and she did not ask. She ate quickly, with her arm curled around the plate, as if someone might snatch it away. It was a habit left over from three months in a cell, and she did not notice it until she saw one of the maids pretend very carefully not to.

She slowed down. She finished the soup. She said thank you.

Then she went upstairs, changed into a soft lotus-green dress from the closet, picked up a small leather bag, and tucked the marriage certificate inside.

Wren was waiting at the foot of the stairs when she came down.

"Madam, are you going out?"

"Yes. Could you arrange someone to accompany me?" She smiled, polite and warm. A different girl entirely from the one who had made a famous actress fall down the stairs that morning.

Does she change her face with every room she enters? Wren wondered. He nodded and called out the door.

A young girl came jogging in from the garden. Round face, big eyes, blue sportswear, and when she saw Josephine she grinned, flashing two small tiger teeth.

"This is Fenna," said Wren. "She has some martial arts training. Three to five men are no trouble for her. She can also drive."

Josephine nodded. Actually, she only needed someone who could sit in the car beside her and later say, truthfully, that the madam had never raised her voice. Whether Fenna could fight or not hardly mattered.

"Thank you. Let's go."

The car rolled out through the iron gates and onto the main road. Josephine was settling back into the seat, watching the pines blur past, when her phone buzzed in her bag.

She glanced at the screen. Reginald Titan.

She had already blocked him on every platform she could find, which meant he was calling from someone else's number. She answered anyway.

"Josephine," Reginald said, his voice shaking with rage, "what's in it for you to mess up our family business?"

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Author's Note: Okay, Raelith fell down the stairs and Josephine did not even look up. Do you think she did it on purpose? Thoughts in the comments. And if you are enjoying this, add the story to your library so chapter 7 finds you.