“Where are my guards?”
“I don’t know who is still yours.”
For the first time, that answer seemed to matter more than any number.
Adrian looked toward the staircase, then the long corridor beyond it. In his own house, he suddenly stood like a man in enemy territory.
A floorboard creaked above them.
Clara grabbed his sleeve before she could think.
He looked down at her hand.
She released him instantly. “Sorry.”
“Do not apologize. Move.”
He pulled a pistol from inside his coat, but Clara shook her head violently.
“No.”
His eyes sharpened. “No?”
“If they hear a shot, the whole house wakes. There is a laundry chute behind the west pantry. It drops to the lower service room.”
“I know my house.”
“No,” Clara said, surprising herself. “You know the rooms people show you.”
For half a second, neither of them moved.
Then Adrian did something even stranger.
He listened.
Clara led him through the side passage beside the dining room. Her shoes made no sound on the runner. Adrian moved behind her with the quiet of a man who had once learned violence in alleys before he could afford marble floors.
At the pantry, Clara pushed aside a shelf of preserves and pressed two fingers into a crack in the paneling. A latch clicked.
Adrian stared at the narrow opening behind it.
“That was sealed.”
“Only from the outside,” Clara whispered. “The old staff used it before the renovations.”
They slipped through as voices approached the dining room.
The passage smelled of dust, old wood, and cold stone. Clara lowered herself first through the service hatch, landing softly on a stack of laundry bags below. Adrian followed, less softly, his shoulder striking the wall.
A shout echoed above.
“Someone opened the pantry.”
Adrian looked at Clara.
She pointed to a lower corridor. “This way.”
They ran.
Not gracefully. Not heroically. They ran like people trying to stay alive.
At the end of the corridor, Clara opened the door to the ironing room and locked it behind them. The small space was hot from the boiler pipes. Sheets hung from overhead racks, ghostly in the dim light.
Adrian grabbed a towel from a shelf and pressed it to the cut on his jaw.
“Start talking,” he said.
Clara almost laughed. The sound came out broken.
“You want my report, sir?”
“I want the truth.”
“You have never wanted that from anyone.”
His eyes lifted.
She regretted the words immediately. A servant did not speak that way to Adrian Voss. A living servant certainly did not.
But Adrian only studied her.
“You are right,” he said.
That frightened her more than a threat.
From above came the muffled thunder of footsteps.
Clara crossed to the laundry desk, opened the bottom drawer, and removed a small tin box. Inside were matches, a sewing kit, an old rosary, a folded photograph, and a cheap prepaid phone.
Adrian watched her. “That is not standard housekeeping equipment.”
“No.”
“Who are you?”
Clara closed the box.
For almost a year, she had hoped no one would ask that question. Not truly.
“My name is Clara Bell now,” she said. “Before that, it was Clara Wynn.”
Recognition flickered in his eyes.
There it was. The name reaching him like a ghost.
“Wynn,” he repeated.
“My father ran numbers for the East Dock crew. My brother drove for them.” Her voice thinned, but she kept it steady. “Three years ago, both of them died in a warehouse fire after your people took the docks.”
Adrian said nothing.
“I came here because I wanted to know who gave the order,” Clara continued. “I thought if I got close enough, listened long enough, I would find proof.” She looked at him then. “I was afraid of you because I believed you burned my family alive.”
The boiler knocked in the wall.
“And now?” Adrian asked.
“Now I think the man upstairs did.”
“Matteo.”
“I heard his name in old kitchen talk. The dock deal. The missing ledgers. Men who disappeared after asking questions.” She took a breath. “I think he used your war to hide his own theft. And I think my brother found out.”
Adrian leaned against the table. The towel in his hand had gone red.
Clara expected denial. Anger. A cold instruction to remember her place.
Instead he said, “What was your brother’s name?”
“Jonah.”
Adrian closed his eyes for a moment.
“I remember him.”
Clara hated that. She hated that her brother was not just a forgotten body to him. It made grief less clean.
“He was twenty-four,” she said.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. You know his use. You know his place on a list. You do not know how he sang badly when he cooked or how he kept every stray dog he found or how he saved for a boat he was never going to buy.”
Adrian absorbed each word like a sentence passed on him.
“You should have gone to the police,” he said quietly.
Clara laughed once. “In this city? With your name involved?”
He had no answer.