Chapter 1 - The Door That Should Have Been Locked
The bus left Chicago’s South Side at 6:43, though I had been sitting beside the window since 6:30 with my forehead against the cold glass and my coat held tightly across my chest.
The city remained half asleep, carrying the exhaustion of people who had worked too hard the previous day. Low winter fog lingered between the buildings. I recognized every corner, every streetlamp with a burned-out bulb, and every dog that barked at nothing when the bus passed over the damp pavement.
I had traveled the same route for almost 1 year and continued watching everything as though it were my 1st morning.
Perhaps looking outside was easier than looking inward.
Before leaving home, I had stood silently in the doorway of my mother’s room.
She breathed slowly, with the labor that had become familiar during the previous months. The lamp remained on because illness had made her afraid of darkness. The room smelled of medicine and the artificial lavender spray I purchased at the neighborhood market because it was 1 of the few scents she could still detect.
I aligned her pillbox with the edge of the table and left a note in the steadiest handwriting I could manage.
Back Sunday night. There is soup in the refrigerator.
My mother opened her eyes briefly, smiled weakly, called me a good girl, and closed them again.
I kissed her forehead and felt the dry warmth of her skin.
She was the reason I worked.
The cost of her medicine did not fit inside the income of anyone honest living on our street. The salary paid by the Vericio family did.
Whenever I believed I could no longer endure the mansion, I remembered the name printed on her prescriptions and continued.
The estate occupied a quiet part of Chicago where the trees were old and the roads contained no potholes.
The bus left me 3 blocks from the gates.
I walked the remaining distance with my head lowered and entered through the service entrance. As I crossed the stone garden, the familiar smell of floor wax escaped through the windows.
The mansion smelled of polished wood, dark flowers, and old money.
The scent remained on clothing long after a shift ended. Encountering it elsewhere could bring the entire house back at once: the waiting, the silence, and the constant need for caution.
Marisol was already in the service kitchen.
Her apron had been tied carelessly, and her hair sat in a crooked bun. At 26, she possessed the sharpest tongue inside the estate.
“You are 3 minutes late,” she said without looking away from the cloth she was folding. “I may have to report you.”
“Good morning to you too.”
“Morning, Bellucci. Put on the apron before Bianca comes downstairs and pretend you have been kneeling somewhere scrubbing.”
I smiled inwardly and tied the apron around my waist.
I had memorized the mansion’s rules during my 1st days.
Lower your eyes around the armed men moving through the corridors.
Do not greet anyone who has not greeted you first.
Do not enter a room without knocking.
Never touch anything bearing the family crest.
The crest appeared everywhere: a lion wearing a broken crown, engraved into dark metal on rings, clocks, ashtrays, and doors.
Il sangue ricorda was carved above the main entrance.
The blood remembers.
I did not know what it remembered.
I had learned not to ask.
The morning passed in choreographed silence.
I scrubbed the entrance marble while kneeling, the floor cold and heavy beneath me and the smell of ammonia burning my eyes.
I replaced the flowers in the small parlor. The white roses had been fresh the previous evening, yet by morning their petals had already curled inward.
Flowers did not last long in the Vericio mansion.
I never understood why.
I carried folded towels to the 2nd floor through the service corridor, with its worn carpet and bare walls. Members of the family never used it.
In the east hallway, I passed 2 enforcers and pretended they were part of the architecture.
They pretended the same about me.
It was an arrangement that worked.
The staff ate after the family in the butler’s pantry, a room far smaller than the dining hall but decorated with the same severity. Italian tiles covered the rear wall. An oak table occupied the center, and shelves held china I cleaned every Thursday but never used.
I was serving myself salad when Bianca Lazzeri entered.
Bianca was the widow of a former family captain and had lived in the mansion under the protection of mourning longer than anyone seemed able to remember.
She always wore her hair secured with an ivory comb, her dresses dark, and her smile sharp.
Whenever she entered a room, the temperature seemed to fall.
“Rosalie,” she said from the doorway. “How amusing to see you eating from the good china.”
I looked down.
The plate was an ordinary piece used by the staff every day.
“It is the same plate as always, Mrs. Bianca.”
“Is it?”
She crossed the pantry slowly and stopped beside me, too close for comfort. Her heavy perfume of iris and musk arrived before the rest of her.
“I thought you had begun helping yourself to other people’s possessions. You have that appearance.”
Across the table, Marisol deliberately dropped her fork.
The sound struck the room’s silence.
Bianca turned.
“It fell,” Marisol said with the calm of someone speaking to a child. “These forks are always falling. Old things.”
Bianca did not answer.
She looked at me from head to toe, lingering longer than necessary, and left.
Her perfume took time to follow her.
I sat with both hands hidden beneath the table.
It was an old habit, and I did not realize I had done it until Marisol exhaled.
“One day,” she said, “I will force 1 of those silver spoons down her throat and claim she choked.”
“Do not say things like that.”
“I will, and you will testify for the defense.”
Don Salvatore passed the pantry door at that moment.
The consigliere was tall and elderly, with shoulders bent slightly from age. He moved slowly and observed almost everything.
He paused when he saw me, inclined his head in the smallest possible greeting, and continued.
I never breathed properly when he acknowledged me that way.
Except for Marisol, he was the only person in the mansion who consistently treated me as a human being.
Perhaps he recognized the same caution in me that he had learned himself: the ability to occupy a room without disturbing anything.
The afternoon disappeared inside minor tasks.
At approximately 5:00, Marisol found me in the service corridor carrying a closed leather folder.
“Forgotten documents,” she said. “They must be placed on the patron’s desk tonight. Don Salvatore’s order.”
“Tonight?”
“He is away until tomorrow. Go upstairs, leave it on the desk, and return. It will take 2 minutes.”
She gave me the folder.
The leather was dark and the metal clasp cold.
“Why the main staircase?”
Marisol shrugged.
“Perhaps because we never use it and he wanted you to experience it once. Go, Bellucci. Do not drop anything.”
I went upstairs at approximately 10:00.
May you like
The mansion had fallen into the peculiar silence only enormous houses possessed, the kind that felt populated even when no one was visible.
It had weight and pressed against the shoulders.
