His Fiancée Forced The Poor Maid Climb A Wobbly Ladder—Until The Mafia Boss Rushed In To Save Her Spotlight8
CHAPTER 1
The stone floor was so cold that Adeline felt the chill before she felt the pain.
She lay on her side, one shoulder pressing against the arm of the man who had just lunged toward her, and for a moment neither of them moved. The feather duster had flown somewhere behind them, and dust still hung in the shaft of light spilling down from the ceiling, drifting slowly like silent snow.
She counted the rungs in her head. She had been counting them out loud, the same way she used to count them for June at bedtime. One. Two. Three. By the sixth, her hands were shaking. She got to nine. And on the ninth, the wood split.
Alio Vicaro braced one hand against the floor and pushed himself halfway upright. The first thing he said wasn’t to ask whether she was all right. He asked whether she could move both legs. His voice was strangely calm, neither frightened nor raised. The voice of someone who had knelt beside other bodies in other rooms and had learned that the right question mattered more than the kind one.
Adeline blinked. She moved one knee, then her foot, and nodded. Then she began apologizing.
She apologized for dropping the feather duster. She apologized for getting dust on his sleeve. She apologized for the noise, for the ladder, for anything that might somehow be counted as her fault. She said all of it with the speed that only people who have spent years living in a position where they are always expected to explain themselves can manage.
Alio didn’t answer a single one of those apologies. He reached out, took hold of her elbow, and helped her sit up slowly, as though she were made of something that might break one more time.
In the doorway leading to the main hall, Camille Thorne stood with her arms folded. She didn’t take a single step closer. She didn’t put down her wine glass. She only watched. And there was no fear on her face. No relief either. Only the faintest look of expectation, like someone watching something that had already been arranged and was now unfolding just a little differently than planned.
Alio stood. He brushed off his sleeve once, exactly once, then called the name of the cleaning crew supervisor, who was standing frozen at the far end of the room. The man came forward, his face drained white, and began saying something about procedure and about how the equipment was inspected regularly.
Alio stopped him simply by raising one hand.
He pointed to the wooden ladder lying on its side across the floor, its broken rung facing upward toward the ceiling, and said that from this moment on, no one was to touch it. No one was to repair it. No one was to remove it from this house. Every splinter of wood was to remain exactly where it had fallen until he gave permission otherwise.
The supervisor nodded again and again. Even much later, he still wouldn’t understand why a broken ladder had been spoken about in the tone people used for a crime scene.
Out in the foyer, the sound of voices had begun to rise. Early guests were taking off their coats, handing their keys to the valet. Bursts of laughter drifted in each time the doors opened.
Alio walked out to meet them. He didn’t climb onto a raised step. He didn’t need anyone to tap a glass for attention. He simply stopped in the middle of the foyer, and the room quieted on its own the way it always did whenever he was present.
He said there was a private matter in his home that evening. He said he was very sorry everyone had traveled so far, and that he would invite each of them back on another occasion.
That was all. He didn’t explain. He didn’t apologize a second time. He inclined his head in farewell and stepped aside, and the valet understood before anyone had time to ask another question. The coats that had just been taken off were put back on. There were a few whispers, one or two questions left unfinished. Then everyone began flowing back toward the doors like receding water.
In the gallery, Adeline sat on the floor, cradling her swelling wrist, listening as engines started one after another beyond the iron gate. One car, then two, then an entire line of them.
Camille was still standing in the same place. Her hand dropped to her side.
Bernadette Felts, whom everyone in the house called Birdie, led Adeline down to the kitchen by the servant’s staircase. She pulled a wooden chair into the middle of the floor, sat Adeline down, then took an old tin first aid box from a cupboard so old that the lid had to be pried open with the tip of a spoon.
She didn’t ask what had happened. She only took Adeline’s wrist, turned it very gently, studied the swelling, then began wrapping it with the practiced hands of someone who had done this many times in her life.
Adeline sat still, her shoulders still trembling. And every time Birdie tightened the bandage a little more, she apologized.
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By the third time, Birdie looked up at her and said that down here in this kitchen, no one needed her to apologize for anything. That upstairs, she could do whatever she pleased. But once she came down here, she could set that habit aside for a little while.
Adeline didn’t answer. She looked down at her hand and saw that it was still holding the shape of gripping something that was no longer there.
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