Chapter 2 2

CHAPTER TWO

The Auersperg townhouse did not look like the kind of place that produced jokes about vampires.

It looked like the kind of place that produced magazine spreads, and I stood outside the gate a full minute trying to remember how to breathe like a person who belonged there.

"You're going to be late," a voice behind me observed, dry and entirely unimpressed.

I turned to find a woman in her fifties with sharp eyes and an apron that suggested serious authority, watching me hover at the gate.

"Sorry. I'm Yara. Kalinova. I'm supposed to start today, in my mother's place, she had an accident, I don't know if anyone told you yet."

"Everyone told me," the woman replied, already turning to lead me up the path. "I am Marta. I run this house, more or less, which today apparently means explaining to a very unhappy employer why his new nanny is not the nanny he actually hired."

"That's reassuring."

"It was not meant to be." She glanced back, something almost sympathetic flickering across her face. "He does not like surprises, Fraulein Kalinova. You are, currently, a very large surprise."

The entrance hall could have swallowed my entire apartment twice over, and I was still trying not to gawk when a small, determined shape came barreling around the corner and collided directly with my legs

"Are you the new one?" The girl attached to my knees couldn't have been more than five, dark curls escaping a lopsided braid. "The other one had a mustache. You don't have a mustache."

"I try to avoid them, generally."

"Zora." Marta's voice carried a warning edge.

"She's not a guest, she's the new nanny," Zora announced, grabbing my hand with a small, sticky fist. "Come see my room. I have a dragon."

"Zora, that's enough."

"It's fine," I replied, letting myself be towed toward the staircase. "I like dragons."

"Everyone likes dragons," Zora explained, with the weary patience of someone explaining something obvious to a slow adult, "except Papa, because Papa says dragons don't exist, which is very funny, actually, because."

"Zora." A third voice cut through the hallway, low and controlled, and Zora went instantly still.

I turned around and understood immediately why my mother had used the word private.

He was tall, dark haired, dressed in a way that made the word expensive feel insufficient, and he looked at me with an expression that managed, in under two seconds, to convey exactly how thoroughly he'd already decided I was a problem.

"You are not Dagmar Kalinova."

"Extremely observant. I'm her daughter."

"I am aware of who you are. I was under the impression I had hired an experienced, vetted professional. What I appear to have instead is a stranger my daughter has already dragged upstairs to look at a stuffed dragon."

"In my defense, the dragon invitation was extremely firm."

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth that was absolutely not a smile. "This is not amusing, Fraulein Kalinova."

"I didn't say it was amusing. I said it was firm." I felt Zora's hand tighten around mine, and something about that small pressure made it easier to keep my spine straight. "My mother broke her ankle two days before she was supposed to start. I'm not trying to replace thirty years of experience. I'm trying to keep a five year old fed and entertained until she's back on her feet, which, last I checked, doesn't require a doctorate."

"It requires considerably more than confidence, which appears to be the only qualification you've demonstrated."

"Give me a week," I offered, surprising myself with how steady it came out. "If I'm terrible, fire me. But you clearly need someone today, and I'm the someone standing in your hallway."

He studied me for a long moment, something calculating behind the coldness, and I had the distinct sensation of being weighed against a scale I couldn't see the markings on.

"A week," he allowed finally. "And Fraulein Kalinova, one further thing."

"Yes?"

"Do not take her onto the third floor. Under any circumstance..."

He didn't finish the sentence.

From somewhere above us, muffled through two floors of old stone, came a sound I would spend the rest of the day trying to talk myself out of having heard at all, a low, dragging scrape, followed by something that might have been a voice and might have been an animal, cut off sharp in the middle like a hand clamped over a mouth.

Marta went white.

She didn't gasp, didn't move, just went very still in a way that was somehow louder than any reaction would have been, and her hand found Zora's shoulder and steered her, quick and practiced, toward the kitchen without a single word of explanation.

Kazimir's face did something I hadn't seen from him yet in our entire two minute acquaintance. For exactly one second, before he caught it and smoothed it back into that careful blankness, he looked afraid.

"That," I offered, when the silence had stretched long enough that someone had to say something, "was not a normal house sound."

"It was the plumbing."

"That did not sound like plumbing."

"This is an old house, Fraulein Kalinova. It makes old house noises." His voice had gone flat, final, the kind of flat that dares you to push and promises you will regret it if you do. "You will not go up there. Not out of curiosity, not because Zora asks, not for any reason at all. Do you understand me?"

"I understand that you're telling me to ignore something that clearly scared your own housekeeper."

"I am telling you," he stated, and something underneath the control had gone low and rough, "that there are things in this house considerably more dangerous than an unqualified nanny, and that the third floor is where I keep them contained. I would like to keep it that way. I would like you to still be here tomorrow to help me do it."

He turned and walked away before I could ask a single one of the twenty questions currently crowding my throat, and I stood alone in the hallway of a house that had just, on my very first morning, told me plainly that something behind one specific door was dangerous enough to frighten a woman who'd clearly worked here for years, and that I was expected to simply accept that and keep unpacking my bag.

I unpacked anyway, because standing frozen in a hallway processing an ancient house's apparent secrets was not going to make the rest of the day go any faster, and Marta found me twenty minutes later folding shirts into a dresser drawer with more force than the task strictly required.

"You are angry," she observed, setting a stack of towels on the end of my bed without being asked.

"I'm processing."

"That is a very diplomatic word for angry." She sat on the edge of the bed, watching me fold with the patience of a woman who had clearly navigated worse first days than mine. "He is not trying to frighten you for sport, Fraulein Kalinova. Whatever you heard, whatever he said, I would ask you to believe that the caution comes from somewhere real, even if he is not currently prepared to explain where."

"That's exactly what he said. Almost word for word."

"Then perhaps you should believe it, coming from two separate people who otherwise have very little reason to coordinate their excuses." Something in her expression softened, just slightly. "This is a strange house to walk into on a first day. I will not pretend otherwise. But the strangeness is not aimed at you specifically, and I think, given time, you will find that out for yourself."

"How long have you worked here, Marta?"

"Since before that little girl downstairs was born. Since before her mother died, even." She stood, smoothing her apron with brisk, practiced hands. "I have seen this family through considerably worse mornings than this one, and I intend to see them through many more, which is precisely why I am telling you, gently, to unpack your bag properly and stop refolding the same shirt four times out of nerves."

I looked down. I had, in fact, refolded the same shirt four times.

"That obvious?"

"Extremely." The corner of her mouth twitched, the first thing close to warmth I'd seen from her since the gate. "Dinner is at six. You will not be joining Herr Auersperg for it, but you will be joining Zora, who has already informed me, at considerable length, of her plans to teach you the rules of a card game she invented herself and refuses to explain in advance."

"That sounds strangely weird ."

"It is. I would recommend losing gracefully. She does not handle losing gracefully herself, and modeling the behavior has, historically, been more effective than lecturing her about it."

----

Dinner, when it came, was exactly as chaotic as promised, Zora's invented card game apparently involving rules that changed at her sole discretion depending on how the hand was going, and I lost four times in a row with what I hoped was convincing enthusiasm, mostly because watching her face light up every time she announced a new rule that happened to favor her current cards was, unexpectedly, the best part of my entire strange first day.

"You're bad at this," she informed me, delighted, stacking her winning cards into a neat, triumphant pile.

"I'm terrible at this. You're clearly a card shark."

"What's a card shark?"

"Someone who's very good at cards and slightly unfair about the rules."

She considered this with total seriousness. "I think that's the nicest thing anyone's ever called me."

I laughed, real and surprised, and it was in the middle of that laugh, still catching my breath, that Zora's small hand found mine across the table, unprompted, entirely without ceremony.

"You're staying for dinner tomorrow too," she informed me.

"Not just tonight. I already decided."

"You're deciding a lot of things today."

"Somebody has to. Papa's busy deciding boring things, like meetings, and Marta's busy deciding what's for lunch, so I decide the important things.

Like who stays for dinner." She offered it with the total, unselfconscious confidence of someone who had never once had a decision of hers seriously overturned, and something in that confidence made me wonder, not for the first time that day, exactly how much of it was genuine and how much was armor built by a child who had already learned, far too young, that some of the people she loved most simply left without explanation.

"Well, since you've already decided," I replied, "I suppose I'll have to stay."

"That's how it works." She hopped down from her chair, Barnabas tucked under one arm, and paused at the kitchen doorway to look back at me with an expression considerably more serious than the conversation had been a moment before. "You're not like the mustache one. He never played cards with me. He claimed he had allergies."

"To cards?"

"That's what I asked too. I don't think that's a real allergy." She shrugged, already losing interest in the mustache man in favor of whatever adventure Barnabas had planned for the evening, and disappeared down the hallway toward her room, leaving me alone at the table with the last of the dishes and a feeling in my chest I hadn't expected to have this early into a job I still wasn't entirely sure I was equipped for.

For one entire hour at that kitchen table, the third floor and the blackmail message and every strange, unresolved thing about this borrowed life had felt considerably further away than they actually were.

It was only later, lying awake in my unfamiliar room, that the day's full weight finally settled properly, Marta's careful defense of a man she clearly respected, Kazimir's genuine fear flickering through his careful control, a sound from upstairs that no explanation about old pipes could actually account for.

I thought about Branka's warning on our landing three days ago, be careful, whatever you're not telling me, and understood, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling for the second time in one impossible week, that I had walked into something considerably larger than an underqualified nanny job, and that whatever it was, it had already decided I was staying.