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I let out a breath and start to turn when the phone vibrates in my hand.

I freeze.

This wasn’t part of the instructions. Who would be texting this phone?

I look down at the screen.

A new message has appeared.

No number. No name.

Just text.

Delaney Cross didn’t listen. Finish it tonight.

For a second, I can’t move. My heart is pounding as I read the words again.

Delaney Cross didn’t listen. Finish it tonight.

This can’t be meant for me.

I’m not the kind of girl who gets secret messages like this. But this phone was left for me. Whoever sent the text knows I have it.

Except I’m no one. I’m a maid. The newest maid in Vexley House. I make beds, scrub bathrooms, polish floors, and disappear whenever someone important walks into a room. That’s my job.

So why would anyone send this to me?

I tighten my fingers around the phone. Is it possible the original message and the money wasn’t meant for me? Did someone leave it in the wrong room? Except I’m the one who needs money for my mother.

But I’m hardly the only person who needs money.

The servants’ wing is a narrow line of small bedrooms on the east side of the house, far enough from the main rooms that no one has to remember we exist.

My room is third from the end. Charlotte is on one side of me, Tiffany on the other. Maybe the envelope was meant for one of them.

Either of them could have been the person who was supposed to stand in the lower corridor and send a message from a burner phone at exactly nine o’clock.

A cold shiver moves over my skin.

Charlotte and Tiffany.

Of course.

The thought shouldn’t make sense, but it does.

They’ve been here longer than I have. They know the house better. They know which doors to avoid, which rooms to enter without knocking, which names to pretend not to hear when voices carry through the walls.

And they’re mean.

Not ordinary mean.

Not the petty kind I dealt with in school from girls who had nicer clothes and fathers who came home at night.

Charlotte and Tiffany are Vexley House mean.

The kind of mean that smiles in front of Audrey Steppe, the head housekeeper, and waits until her back is turned to knock your clean towels onto the floor. The kind that hides your supplies, whispers about your mother’s illness, and makes you feel like every mistake you make is proof you don’t belong here. They treat Hazel and me like we’re no better than the scuffs on their shoes, even though we all wear the same uniform. We all scrub the same marble. We all lower our eyes when a Vexley passes.

What makes them better than me?