Vespera
I make my way to the servant's dining hall, located two floors up. It's a bleak, windowless room filled with long wooden tables. The other servants are there—men and women in identical grey uniforms, hunched over bowls of thin soup. The atmosphere is suffocatingly quiet. No one laughs. No one complains about the food. They eat with a mechanical desperation, their eyes fixed on their plates.
I sit at the end of a table, next to a young boy no older than eighteen. He's staring at his hands, which are stained with the same dark residue as mine.
"First day in the hole?" he asks, his voice barely a whisper.
"How could you tell?" I ask, my voice hoarse.
"You still have color in your cheeks," he says, giving me a ghostly look. "Give it a month. The lye eats the color. Then it eats the memories. Then you're just a part of the plumbing."
"Who are they?" I ask, leaning in closer. "The people who... end up in that room?"
The boy shudders, his spoon clattering against the wooden table. "They aren't people. Not to the Don. They're 'messages.' Or 'obstacles.' Sometimes, they're just... food. That's what the old-timers say, anyway. Don't ask questions, Vespera. If you start wondering who they were, you'll start seeing them in the shadows. And once you start seeing them, you're no good to the Master anymore."
"I don't plan on being 'good' to him," I mutter. "I just plan on surviving."
The boy looks at me with a pity that makes me want to scream. "Surviving in the Valerius house isn't living. It's just waiting for your turn to be the one holding the brush, or the one the brush has to clean up."
He gets up and leaves without another word. I look down at my soup, but the steam rising from the bowl reminds me too much of the lye-scented fog in the basement. I push it away.
I am Vespera Vane. I am a cleaner. But as I sit in the silence of the dining hall, surrounded by the living dead.
I stand up, my muscles screaming in protest, and head toward the servant's dormitory. I need to sleep. I need to dream of a world where the air smells like lilies for real, and not just as a cover for the scent of death. But as I walk through the darkened hallways, I can feel the house watching me. The gargoyles on the cornices seem to tilt their heads, their stone eyes tracking my movement.
The servant's dormitory is a place where hope goes to be strangled in its sleep. It is a long, narrow gallery of iron cots, each separated by a thin, moth-eaten curtain that offers the illusion of privacy but none of the security. As I crawl onto my mattress, I don't even have the strength to pull off my boots. My body feels like a machine that has been run until its gears have stripped—a singular, throbbing ache that vibrates from the soles of my feet to the crown of my skull. The skin of my face is tight, sensitized by the caustic bite of the lye fumes that managed to find the gaps in my mask.
I close my eyes, desperate for the darkness to take me, but the Killing Room has followed me upstairs. It is burned into the back of my eyelids. Every time I blink, I see the fan-shaped sprays of rust-brown on the concrete. I see the industrial drains, the metal mesh choked with the grey froth of dissolved evidence. The silence of the dormitory isn't peaceful; it is heavy, filled with the collective, ragged breathing of thirty other "Ghosts" who have spent their day erasing the sins of the Valerius family. We are a chorus of the exhausted, a symphony of people who have learned that the price of a paycheck is the slow erosion of the soul.
I roll onto my side, my heart hammering a frantic, uneven rhythm. I keep thinking about the "organic buildup" in the central drain. My mind, fueled by trauma and fatigue, tries to put a face to the stains. Was it a man who had a family? A rival who thought he could outmaneuver the Don? Or was it just some poor soul who saw something he shouldn't have—someone like me?
In this house, curiosity is a death sentence. I have to remember that. I am Vespera Vane, a girl who came here to disappear. I didn't come here to be a hero or a witness. I came here because the world outside was even more dangerous than the one in this basement. But as I lie there, the scent of copper seems to rise from my own skin, thick and cloying, mocking the expensive soap I used to scrub my hands. It's in my hair. It's in my lungs. I feel like I am becoming part of the room I clean—just another tool, another piece of the plumbing.