Chapter 3 3

CHAPTER THREE

Yarina-

Zora found me twenty minutes later in the room Marta had shown me, sitting cross legged on my bed with Barnabas the dragon tucked under one arm like a shield.

"You heard it too," she guessed. Not a question.

"I heard something."

"Everyone hears it sometimes. Marta says it's the house settling. Papa says it's nothing." She picked at a loose thread on Barnabas's ear, not looking at me.

"The other nanny left because of it. The mustache one. He heard it twice and then he just left, in the middle of the night, and Papa was really quiet for a whole week after."

That detail sat in my chest like a stone. Not a resignation letter. Not a polite two weeks' notice. A grown man, presumably paid very well, leaving in the middle of the night rather than spend one more night in this house.

"Are you scared of it?"

"Sometimes." She offered it small, and then, faster, like she was covering the admission with something else before it could land too hard, "But I'm not scared of you leaving. You should know that. I already decided you're staying, so it doesn't matter if you're scared, because staying isn't a choice you get to make. I already made it."

I looked at her properly then, five years old and already this practiced at deciding things before the adults in her life could take them away from her, and something in my old preschool teacher instincts recognized exactly what that sentence actually was underneath the bravado.

"Okay," I replied. "Then let's not talk about being scared. Let's talk about Barnabas instead. I want to hear about the feud with the rabbit."

Her whole face changed, relief flooding in so fast it made my chest ache, and she launched into an elaborate account of Barnabas's ongoing political rivalry with Pepper that had absolutely nothing and everything to do with the actual conversation we'd just had, and I let her have it, because sometimes the kindest thing you can do for a frightened five year old is not talk about the fear at all, just build a world next to it loud enough to stand in.

We were an hour into the feud, deep in negotiations over a treaty neither stuffed animal was likely to honor, when I noticed the rhythm of the house shift downstairs, a door, footsteps, the particular quiet that meant someone was listening for us rather than simply passing by.

"Does your father ever eat with you?" I asked, mostly to keep the conversation moving, not expecting the answer to matter.

"No. Never. He can't." Zora offered it the way she described everything strange about her home, total unconcern layered over a fact she'd clearly stopped questioning long ago. "Marta says some people just aren't built for regular food. I asked once if that made him sad and she got the face."

"The face?"

"The face grown ups make when they're deciding how much to lie."

I filed that answer away with everything else, and it was still sitting there, unresolved, when Zora decided, twenty minutes later, that the current phase of our game required maximum volume, both of us collapsing dramatically onto the study floor mid battle, shrieking with the specific delight of a child who has finally found an adult willing to be loud with her.

Kazimir was in the doorway in under three seconds. Not walking. Just there, the way he'd been there my first morning, and this time his eyes weren't cold, they were wide, and his hand was gripping the doorframe hard enough that I heard the wood creak.

"Everything is fine," I announced, arms still raised mid collapse. "We were being dragons. Dragons make noise."

He didn't answer right away. His jaw was tight, his knuckles white against old wood, and something in his stillness had none of the icy control from our first meeting, it looked, if anything, like a man holding himself together by main force.

"You were screaming," he managed finally, low.

"Dying dramatically. There's a difference."

"Ten out of ten," Zora confirmed, from the floor, entirely unbothered.

"You cannot do that." His voice had gone rough at the edges in a way I hadn't heard from him. "Not the screaming. I would ask, specifically, that you not scream in this house, under any circumstances, however dramatic the death."

"That's oddly specific for a noise complaint."

Something in his expression cracked, just slightly, and he stepped fully into the room instead of retreating the way he had our first day, which surprised me more than anything he'd done so far.

"I am not entirely in control of certain instincts," he admitted, quiet enough that Zora, absorbed again in Barnabas's grievances, didn't seem to be listening. "A raised voice in this house draws attention I would rather it not draw. I am asking you to trust that I have good reason, even though I am not currently prepared to explain what it is."

"That's a very specific kind of vague."

"It is the most honest thing I have told you since you arrived." He held my gaze a beat longer than either of our previous exchanges had allowed, something unguarded in it that hadn't been there in the hallway two days ago.

"I would like you to understand that I am not simply a difficult employer enjoying a list of arbitrary rules, Fraulein Kalinova. I would like you to trust that every one of them costs me something to enforce, and that I would not ask if it did not matter."

It wasn't an explanation. It wasn't close to one. But it was more than he'd given me in the hallway, more than a cold order and a closed door, and something about the plain, tired honesty of it landed harder than any of his sharper lines had.

"Okay," I agreed. "No screaming. Even dramatically."

"Thank you."

He left without the usual clipped finality, glancing back once from the doorway in a way that felt, for the first time, less like a man dismissing an unwanted hire and more like a man leaving a conversation he wasn't quite ready to end.

I sat with Zora for another hour after that, the two of us building an increasingly elaborate blanket fort out of couch cushions while Barnabas presided over the construction from a place of honor on the highest available pillow, and it wasn't until we were both crammed inside it, giggling over some invented crisis involving Pepper the rabbit's territorial ambitions, that I finally asked the question I'd been circling since the hallway.

"Zora. Does your papa ever get scared?"

She considered this with the particular seriousness small children bring to questions they've clearly thought about before.

"Everybody gets scared. Even

grown ups. Marta says grown ups are just better at hiding it."

"Do you think he's scared right now?"

"I think he's scared all the time, actually." She said it so plainly, so matter of fact, that it landed harder than any dramatic revelation could have. "He checks my door twice every night. I used to think it was because he thought I'd sneak out, but I don't think that's it anymore. I think he's checking that I'm still there because he's scared I won't be, one day, like Mama wasn't."

I didn't have a response ready for that, mostly because five year olds occasionally said things with a clarity that stopped adults cold, and I pulled her a little closer under the blanket instead, letting the silence hold what neither of us had the right words for yet.

"You're not going anywhere," I told her. "Not because I'm promising something I can't keep. Because that's just true, right now, today. I'm here."

"You said that already. On my first day. About uhmmm, staying."

"I know. I'm saying it again, because apparently that's how promises work in this family. You have to say them twice before they stick."

She laughed at that, small and delighted, clearly recognizing her own earlier phrase reflected back at her, and burrowed further into the blanket fort with the particular contentment of a child who has decided, for tonight at least, that the world is safe enough to fall asleep in.

I stayed until she actually did fall asleep, carrying her carefully back to her own bed afterward, Barnabas tucked under one arm, and it was walking back down the darkened hallway toward my own room that I passed the closed door to the third floor stairwell for the first time since that morning, and found myself standing in front of it longer than I should have, listening to a silence that felt, somehow, considerably less empty than silence usually did.

I did not go up. I want that clearly understood, because it would be easy, in hindsight, to make this moment sound braver or more reckless than it actually was.

I simply stood there, one hand not quite touching the banister, feeling the particular weight of a door that two separate people had now warned me about in almost identical language, and thought about a nanny who'd left in the middle of the night rather than explain what he'd seen, and about a man downstairs whose hand had cracked a doorframe over the sound of a five year old's laughter.

I was still standing there when Kazimir found me, appearing at the bottom of the stairs with a quiet that suggested he'd been watching for longer than I'd realized.

"You are not going up," he observed. It wasn't quite a question.

"I'm not going up."

"But you wanted to."

"I wanted to understand," I corrected, turning to face him properly. "There's a difference. I'm not reckless, whatever tonight might have suggested. I just don't like being handed a rule with no explanation attached to it and told to simply obey."

"Most people obey considerably faster than you, once they understand the alternative."

"I'm not most people. I already told you, I've had kind of a strange week." I studied his face in the dim hallway light, looking for whatever careful mask he usually kept in place, and found it thinner than usual, worn down by whatever had happened earlier over Zora's laughter. "You could tell me. Right now. Whatever it is."

"I could." He didn't move any closer, but something in his voice had gone quieter, more considering than I'd heard from him yet. "I find that I am, against my own better judgment, considering it. Which is, in itself, considerably more alarming to me than anything currently happening behind that door."

"Why alarming?"

"Because I do not make a habit of considering things against my own better judgment, Fraulein Kalinova, and you have managed it twice in as many days." Something almost wry moved across his expression, gone as quickly as it arrived. "Go to bed. It has been a long day, and I suspect tomorrow will not be shorter."

He was gone before I could push further, disappearing back down the hallway with the same quiet, unhurried grace as always, and I stood there a moment longer, turning his words over, before I finally made myself walk on, past the third floor door and into my own room.

Understanding, in some vague, unformed way, that whatever was happening in this house had just shifted slightly, from a stranger's rule I was expected to obey without question into something closer to a secret two people were, slowly and reluctantly, beginning to carry together. a photograph of myself leaving the Auersperg gate that same afternoon, three words underneath it that turned my stomach to ice.

×We know everything.×