Chapter 2 - THE HOUSE NOBODY COULD SURVIVE
My first official morning began at 5:42.
Not because my shift started then.
Because Margaret Bell believed arriving eighteen minutes early was the universe’s preferred method of correcting arriving eighteen minutes late.
She handed me a ring of keys.
“Kitchen. Linen closets. Storage. Laundry.”
I examined them.
“No west wing?”
Margaret stared at me.
“That was a joke.”
“No jokes about the west wing.”
“Understood.”
The mansion employed seventeen people.
Three cooks rotated through the kitchen.
Four security officers worked the grounds.
Two drivers.
Two groundskeepers.
A maintenance technician named Ernesto.
Margaret.
Frank.
Two house attendants.
Me.
And several men whose employment responsibilities were never explained.
They wore expensive suits, communicated through earpieces, and had the remarkable ability to appear behind you without producing footsteps.
I mentally categorized them as Not My Business.
By nine in the morning, I understood why maids quit.
It wasn’t the cleaning.
It was the atmosphere.
Every employee moved as though an invisible glass were balanced on their head.
Nobody laughed loudly.
Nobody lingered in hallways.
Nobody asked questions.
And whenever Luca entered a room, conversations stopped.
Not because he demanded it.
Because people had trained themselves to disappear around him.
I found that irritating.
People became stupid when they were afraid.
They forgot things.
Hid mistakes.
Created bigger problems.
At 10:17, I discovered forty-eight bottles of imported mineral water stored beside a malfunctioning heating pipe.
At 11:02, I found an invoice showing the mansion had paid $3,800 for replacement cabinet handles.
At 11:46, Ernesto told me nobody had replaced cabinet handles in eighteen months.
At noon, I brought the invoice to Margaret.
“This looks wrong.”
She glanced at it.
“Put it back.”
“We paid almost four thousand dollars for something we didn’t receive.”
“I said put it back.”
“That seems financially irresponsible.”
“Claire.”
Her tone changed.
“Your job is housekeeping.”
I lowered the paper.
“Okay.”
I returned it.
But the number stayed inside my head.
That evening Luca hosted dinner for six men.
I never learned exactly who they were.
One owned construction companies.
Another appeared regularly on financial news.
One had been photographed beside two Chicago mayors.
Another looked like he had never once filled out his own tax return.
My responsibility was simple.
Make sure the dining room remained perfect.
Halfway through dinner, a waiter bumped the table.
A crystal glass tipped.
Red wine spread across white linen.
The young waiter froze.
Everyone froze.
Luca looked at the stain.
The waiter went pale.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Moretti.”
Luca’s expression stayed unreadable.
Before the silence could swallow the boy alive, I stepped forward.
“Sir, the tablecloth attacked first.”
Six men looked at me.
Margaret looked ready to faint.
I lifted the damaged linen.
“It’s always the expensive ones.”
One guest laughed.
Then another.
Tension broke.
I replaced the cloth section and removed the glass.
As I passed Luca, his voice was barely audible.
“You enjoy testing your employment?”
“I enjoy keeping employees from dying of anxiety.”
He looked at me.
Then resumed dinner.
The waiter remained employed.
That mattered more than Luca’s opinion.
Later, as I crossed the upstairs corridor, I heard voices from his office.
One belonged to Luca.
The other belonged to a man named Adrian Vale, Luca’s chief financial officer.
I had seen Adrian twice.
Forty-five.
Perfect suits.
Silver watch.
Smile without warmth.
He handled the Moretti family’s legitimate businesses—commercial real estate, logistics, hospitality, construction.
“I want the South Harbor numbers again,” Luca said.
“They’ve been reviewed.”
“Review them again.”
“There’s nothing wrong.”
“Then reviewing them won’t be difficult.”
I kept walking.
Not My Business.
At least that was what I told myself.
The next morning, three maintenance invoices appeared on Margaret’s desk.
One was from Moretti Construction.
One from Lakefront Services.
And one from a company called Halston Property Solutions.
The Halston invoice was for $18,400.
Description:
WEST WING RESTORATION.
I stared.
The west wing had supposedly been closed for years.
I knew because one of the cooks, Teresa, had told me during lunch.
“No one goes there.”
“Why?”
She crossed herself.
“I don’t ask.”
“That’s dramatic.”
“So is keeping your job.”
I returned to the invoice.
$18,400.
Then noticed something.
The vendor address.
2149 South Archer Avenue.
I knew that address.
Not personally.
But I had spent two miserable months working for a property management company near Bridgeport.
2149 South Archer wasn’t an office.
It was an abandoned laundromat.
Or at least it had been.
I took out my phone.
Then remembered every security camera in the house probably had a better understanding of my location than I did.
I put the phone away.
Not My Business.
I repeated it like prayer.
At 4:30, Margaret sent me upstairs to deliver fresh linens.
I passed the west corridor.
A black door stood at the far end.
Locked.
Silent.
I kept walking.
Then something slid underneath it.
A sheet of paper.
I stopped.
The paper rested halfway into the hallway.
I looked left.
Right.
Nobody.
Every intelligent instinct told me to continue walking.
Unfortunately, curiosity had always been one of my least financially responsible qualities.
I approached.
The page contained columns of numbers.
Bank transfers.
Invoice references.
Vendor codes.
And at the top:
HALSTON PROPERTY SOLUTIONS.
My stomach tightened.
The same company.
At the bottom was a handwritten note.
MARCH 11 — $240,000.
MARCH 18 — $310,000.
MARCH 29 — $420,000.
Nearly a million dollars.
None of it resembled cleaning expenses.
I crouched.
That was when the west-wing door opened.
I slowly looked up.
Luca Moretti stood on the other side.
His expression made my blood turn cold.
His gaze moved from me…
to the page in my hand.
Then back.
“Claire.”
I stood.
“This looks worse than it is.”
“It looks like you’re standing outside the one room I told you never to approach.”
“Technically, I’m standing outside a hallway.”
His eyes hardened.
I held up the paper.
“This came under the door.”
He took it.
For the first time since meeting him, I saw something close to alarm.
Not anger.
Recognition.
“Where did you get this?”
“It slid out.”
“Who gave it to you?”
“No one.”
His voice became quieter.
“Think carefully.”
“I am.”
Luca examined the numbers.
Then looked beyond me.
The hallway was empty.
He stepped outside and closed the door.
“Go downstairs.”
“What is Halston Property Solutions?”
His jaw tightened.
“You’re asking questions again.”
“You’re paying them hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
“That isn’t your concern.”
“You hired me partly because I can do bookkeeping.”
“I hired you to clean my house.”
“Then whoever cleans your bank accounts is doing a much better job.”
That earned me a stare powerful enough to eliminate weaker employees.
But Luca didn’t fire me.
Instead he folded the paper once.
Very carefully.
“Did anyone see you pick this up?”
“No.”
“Did you photograph it?”
“No.”
“Did you tell Margaret?”
“No.”
“Good.”
He stepped closer.
“From now on, if you find anything unusual, you bring it directly to me.”
I frowned.
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to look for secrets.”
“You’re not.”
“Then why—”
“Because apparently they’ve decided to look for you.”
He walked away.
I watched him until he disappeared around the corner.
Then glanced toward the locked door.
Something had changed.
Yesterday I had been the new maid.
Today Luca Moretti had given me a private instruction nobody else knew about.
And before the night ended, I would discover something even stranger.
The paper hadn’t accidentally slipped underneath the west-wing door.
Someone had pushed it toward me.
May you like
Someone inside Luca Moretti’s mansion wanted me to see those numbers.
And whoever they were knew exactly what I had noticed about Halston Property Solutions.
