Chapter 2 - THE NAME SHE WOULD NOT SAY
Maximilian pulled Clara inside before the darkness could become cover for anyone else.
He locked the service door and ordered Mrs. Gable to send the staff away. She hesitated.
“Now.”
His voice emptied the corridor.
Clara stood near the boiler-room radiator wrapped in his overcoat. She kept one hand over the ring and the other beneath her belly. Maximilian noticed both gestures.
“Show it to me.”
“No.”
No employee had answered him that way in years. His gaze hardened.
“That ring belonged to someone in my family.”
“It belongs to me now.”
“Who gave it to you?”
Clara’s lower lip trembled, but she remained silent.
Maximilian reached toward the chain. She recoiled so violently that he stopped.
Fear of him was ordinary in the Russo house. Her fear was different. She was not afraid he would punish her. She was afraid he would recognize the truth.
Mrs. Gable returned carrying Clara’s personnel file. It was thin: references from a closed hotel, a Massachusetts address that belonged to a demolished apartment building, and identification issued seven months earlier.
“She lied on her application,” the housekeeper said. “I warned security.”
“You hired her anyway,” Maximilian replied.
Mrs. Gable looked down. “Mr. Dominic approved it.”
She seemed to realize she had said too much. Her hand moved across the ledger as if she could cover the sentence after speaking it. Clara noticed a column of red marks beside her own name—far more than any attendance record required. Dates of prenatal appointments, nausea, breaks, and every package delivered to the servants’ entrance had been documented with unnatural precision.
She had not been hired despite her pregnancy.
Someone had hired her because of it.
Dominic Russo—Maximilian’s uncle and chief adviser—approved no maid personally.
That fact changed the room.
Maximilian picked up the ultrasound photograph where Clara had dropped it. The date was two weeks earlier. No father’s name appeared.
“How far along?”
“Twenty-nine weeks.”
He calculated without meaning to. Seven months carried the question backward toward another winter night, a missing car, and a brother declared dead without a body.
Clara saw the calculation in his face.
“This baby has nothing to do with you,” she said quickly.
“I didn’t ask whether it did.”
Footsteps approached. Clara went white.
Dominic entered with two security men. He was sixty, silver-haired, and gentle in the way certain knives looked decorative before touching skin.
“Mrs. Gable reported a disturbance.” His eyes found the chain at Clara’s throat. “How unfortunate.”
Maximilian moved between them.
Dominic smiled. “You recognize the ring?”
“Everyone in this family would.”
“Then you know it was stolen from a dead man.”
Clara’s breathing broke.
Dominic ordered security to search her room. Maximilian countermanded him.
“She stays where I can question her.”
“You are allowing grief to cloud judgment.”
“Whose grief?” Maximilian asked.
For the first time, Dominic’s smile disappeared.
Maximilian escorted Clara to a guarded guest room rather than the servants’ quarters. Before closing the door, he asked once more, “Who gave you the ring?”
May you like
Clara looked past him at Dominic waiting in the hall.
Then she whispered, “Ask your uncle why he never found your brother’s body.”
