Chapter 2 - The Song in the Dark
The decision was made before the sun set. I was stripped of my cleaning rags and moved from the servants' quarters in the basement to a beautifully furnished room on the second floor, positioned right at the boundary where the grand hallway met the dark, heavy double doors of the forbidden North Wing.
"You are no longer a maid, Emily," Alexander told me in his study, his hands resting on his mahogany desk. The room smelled of expensive tobacco and old paper. "You are Mason's caretaker. Whatever you did in that foyer... do it again. Keep him calm. If he hurts you again, you will be compensated. But do not let him slip back into the dark."
That night, the mansion was quiet, save for the wind howling against the tall glass panes. I sat on the edge of Mason’s bed in the nursery. The room was massive, filled with expensive toys he had never touched, but he lay curled into a tight, defensive ball, his eyes wide and staring into the shadows.
I reached out, moving slowly so as not to startle him, and gently smoothed his hair. He flinched, but then leaned his forehead against my knee.
To soothe him, I began to sing. It was an old, simple lullaby my mother used to sing to Leo when his chest pain was too great to let him sleep.
As the melody drifted through the high-ceilinged room, the tension slowly drained from Mason's small shoulders. His breathing became deep and rhythmic.
A shadow fell across the doorway. I looked up to see Alexander standing in the hall, his dark coat damp from the rain outside. He looked exhausted, the sharp edges of his dangerous persona slightly softened by the dim yellow glow of the nursery nightlight.
"Camila used to sing something like that," Alexander said quietly, his voice carrying a rare, raw vulnerability. "She had a Spanish melody she would hum when he was a baby. He hasn't heard it in two years."
The mention of his mother’s name seemed to ripple through the air. On the bed, Mason began to tremble. His eyes flew open, but they weren't filled with rage. They were wide with a desperate, searching intensity.
He grabbed the sleeve of my grey uniform, his small fingers pulling me down until my ear was inches from his lips. He struggled, his throat clicking as if he were trying to force a rusted gear to turn inside his chest.
And then, in a voice as fragile as spun glass, the little boy whispered his first word in two years:
"Door."
The word hung in the sterile air of the nursery. Alexander went ghost-white, his hand gripping the doorframe so tightly his knuckles turned a bloodless shade of ivory.
Because Mason had not spoken since the day his mother was murdered. And the first word he chose to say was not Mommy. It was not Daddy.
May you like
It was door.
My gaze drifted past Alexander's frozen figure, landing on the heavy, locked entrance of the North Wing just down the hall. For the first time since I had arrived at the Blackwood estate, I saw a flicker of genuine terror in the eyes of the city's most feared mafia boss.
