Chapter 3 - The War of Attrition
By 4:00 PM, Claire had dried her clothes, brushed out her hair, and established her base of operations in the third-floor guest suite—a room larger than her entire Queens apartment, draped in heavy velvet curtains and smelling faintly of lavender and old paper.
She didn't unpack her suitcase. Unpacking implied permanence, and forty-eight hours was a lifetime in the Moretti household.
At precisely 5:50 PM, she descended the grand central staircase, her senses on high alert. She had spent the last two hours studying the blueprints of the manor she had found tucked inside the library's visitor guide—a habit of a hotel manager who always needed to know every emergency exit.
She reached the second-floor landing, where the hallway branched off toward the children's wing.
Clatter.
A small, high-speed projectile whistled past her ear, missing her head by inches before embedding itself with a sharp thwack into the wood paneling behind her.
Claire stopped. She slowly reached out and plucked the object from the wall.
It was a heavy steel-bearing marble, wrapped in a sticky note that read in clumsy, blocky handwriting: GO HOME WITCH.
Claire looked down the dimly lit hallway. Three pairs of dark eyes gleamed from the shadows near the nursery door.
"Nice arm, Noah," Claire called out into the hallway, her voice ringing clear. "Though your trajectory was off by roughly four degrees to the left. If you're going to use ball bearings, you need to compensate for the draft coming off the stairwell."
Silence echoed down the corridor.
A small, identical head poked out from behind a carved oak statue. It was Caleb, his brow furrowed in genuine professional offense. "Four degrees?"
"At least," Claire replied, walking slowly down the hall toward them without flinching. "And using steel marbles inside a house with antique wainscoting? Your father is going to take the cost of those repairs straight out of your weekly allowances—assuming, of course, a man like Adrian Moretti gives six-year-olds allowances, which I sincerely doubt."
The three boys stepped out into the light, eyeing her with a mixture of suspicion and grudging curiosity. They were identical triplets—Noah with a small scar over his left eyebrow, Caleb with a slight chip in his front tooth, and Miles, the quiet one, standing slightly behind them with his hands shoved deep into his pockets.
"He doesn't give us allowances," Miles spoke for the first time, his voice surprisingly soft and deep. "He just buys us whatever we want so we leave him alone."
Claire stopped two feet in front of them. Up close, they looked devastatingly young—too young to possess the cold, calculating detachment of children raised in a fortress of stone and shadows. They looked like little boys who had forgotten how to laugh without looking over their shoulders.
"Well," Claire said, kneeling down so she was at eye level with them. "That sounds boring. Buying things is easy. Making someone miserable takes actual effort, and honestly, your methods are derivative. Garter snakes? Tripwires? That’s straight out of a 1990s family comedy."
Noah’s eyes flashed defensively. "We made Miss Higgins cry until she threw up in the umbrella stand!"
"Miss Higgins was weak," Claire said firmly. "She smelled like lavender powder and panic. I smell like cheap coffee and stubbornness. There is a distinct difference."
Caleb stared at her blazer, which still had a faint damp patch near the shoulder. "Weren't you mad about the water?"
"I was freezing, wet, and annoyed," Claire admitted honestly. "If I were still thirty-seven dollars into my bank account of rage, I would have yelled at you. But since I am currently billing your father at an exorbitant hourly rate to deal with your nonsense, I consider it a hazardous duty bonus."
Miles tilted his head, his gray eyes studying her with intense, unsettling focus. "You're not going to call our dad."
"Why would I?" Claire asked, raising an eyebrow. "Snitching is for amateurs. If we have a war, we handle it ourselves. Now, dinner is in ten minutes. If you try to trip me on the stairs, make sure the knot is double-tied; otherwise, I’ll just trip you right back."
The three boys stared at her in stunned silence. No nanny had ever spoken to them like they were human beings, let alone threatened to trip them back.
May you like
"You can't trip us," Noah scoffed. "Dad would fire you."
"Your dad hired me to survive forty-eight hours," Claire smiled, standing up and dusting off her skirt. "He didn't specify whether I had to be polite while doing it. Shall we?"
