AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Like I believe that crap for one second.
I expect him to show me to the same posh velvet-adorned receiving room where I’m left to twiddle my thumbs every time I have to come up here. Whenever it’s not about taking me right to the site of a dead body.
Instead, he takes me a little deeper into the manor.
He raps lightly on a heavy mahogany door, listens, and then—when there’s not a single sound—pushes the door open on an opulently decorated office.
“Mr. Arrendell isn’t in residence today,” Peter says icily, which makes me wonder just where Montero is. “However, the Lady of the house will be in to see you as soon as she’s available. Please have a seat and wait.”
Thetry not to dirty up the placeis clear in his acrid tone, and in the snobby look he rakes over me, from my uniform down to my boots.
Whatever.
They’re still a bit muddy from tromping around in a clearing splattered with blood and bleach-white bones when I haven’t had time to clean them.
But there’s something else there, too.
A sort of nervous fear.
As he walks away stiffly, he glances back, his eyes rolling like a spooked horse.
There’s something in that look that almost seems to say,Save me.
You know the saying, if walls could talk?
What would these servants say if they felt free to run their mouths without catching a pink slip or worse?
I step into the office—so much red fucking upholstery everywhere, what is with these people and their red, it looks like a seventies porno shoot—and hunker down in a chair that really ain’t made for someone my size.
The polished wooden legs creak a little in warning.
I’m itching to do a little digging, but if Lucia walks in and catches me rooting around in her files, I’m not gonna leave with my head intact.
No surprise, the office has the same glamorous gothic vibe as the rest of the place.
I still can’t help looking around, taking in what I can.
An oil painting of a younger Lucia and Montero with their four sons as kids, including the supposedly disgraced and exiled Vaughn. Even in that painting, he’s standing a little apart from the others, like there’s something walling him off from the rest of them. Kid’s got an overly serious face, and the painter captured something troubled in his eyes for sure.
The others are different.
Feels like looking at human masks painted over the oily, hissing faces of snakes.
Everything else is priceless vases, odd little old statues from Egypt or Greece, awards for charitable contributions and philanthropic acts.
A framed doctorate on the wall.
Never knew Lucia Arrendell had a PhD in psychology, but it makes me a little more wary of what I’m dealing with and that fluttering façade she likes to put on.
I’m just glancing at her desk and realizing the brochure sticking out of her bristling planner is for a wedding florist when I get a face full of liar. The door opens behind me and the Lady of the manor comes gliding inside like her feet never touch the ground.
She’s stuck in a bygone era, her shimmery pearl-colored dress swaying around her calves. Its fringe lashes with dancing steps that belong to a younger woman.
She’s lean as a rake and her mouth is a violent red, painted and stark and smiling below eyes that don’t reflect any warmth at all.
Like I said.
Human mask. Serpent underneath.
