Chained: Reckless Desires (Dragon's Heart Book 1)

by Jacqueline Sweet

  She was left largely alone at work. Miss Agatha stopped in occasionally to direct her to new projects and Rodney winked at her when he passed on some errand for his master, but otherwise she was alone with her thoughts. But the work occupied her enough to keep her mind off of everything, at least for a while. It felt good to lose herself in a project. It was better than stewing in thoughts of how she should have handled Heath differently, how she should have run to the senior partners right then, how if only she’d left work five minutes earlier she could have slipped away to a nice dinner and not wrecked her life.

  She met Chloe, Agatha and Rodney for lunch in the dining hall. It had been built for special occasions, with long beautiful tables each carved from a single felled redwood tree and massive chandliers, but it hadn’t been used by the Winterborns in decades. With its high ceilings and peaceful air, it was a much more pleasant place to take a break than the cramped servant’s dining room. The food was the same as what Winterborn was eating that day—a spicy daal soup with rice and thick slabs of buttery naan. It was the best Indian food Bella had ever had.

  The four of them ate hurriedly, in silence. Rodney nearly slurped the bowl down in his urgency. Whereas Agatha wiped her mouth after every bite and carefully reapplied her nude lipstick as soon as her plate was clean.

  “I don’t know,” Chloe said, looking at the empty space next to her. “Maybe it could’ve used a bit more cinnamon?”

  “Ignore her,” Rodney said. “Creepy Chloe is always talking to the ghosts of this place.”

  “Enough of that, Mister Trent,” Agatha snapped. “Our courtesy must extend to one another as surely as to the lord. Then she turned to Bella, “This is only your first day, girl, but your pace is abysmally slow. I expected you to be finished with the east wing by now, and yet you’ve barely cleared one room.” She shook her head, as if it was evidence that Bella would not last long in the position. “Move on to the western wing when you’re done here.” Agatha gave Rodney the stink eye and left. He pulled out his phone and studiously ignored everyone while he finished his coffee.

  Something about the room bothered Bella. But she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

  “They built it around them,” Chloe said with a wry grin.

  “What?”

  “The tables. You’re wondering how you get hundred-foot tables through the doors.” She wasn’t, but that was one of things bothering her. “They made the tables and then built the walls,” Chloe said. “This place is trippy. I love it here. I’ve always been attracted to weirdness, y’know?”

  “Is that why you stay?” Bella asked. It bothered her that these likable, talented people worked for a monster like Winterborn. There had to be some deeper reason. Was he blackmailing them? Did he pay them outrageous salaries? “With the way you cook, you could work anywhere.”

  Chloe shook her head. “Like I said, girl. It’s the ghosts that do the cooking. I just follow directions. And I like this place. I’ve worked a lot of jobs and this is the first one where no one cared about my ghost thing.”

  Bella studied the girl. She was serious. She really thought she could see ghosts, but that was nuts, wasn’t it?

  A man poked his head into the dining hall. He was bald and her father’s age, with a brown suit, wire-rimmed glasses, and a pinched expression. He had a neatly trimmed beard that was black, peppered with white. “Excellent job on the food, Chloe,” he said. His voice was cool and clear and professional. Everything about the man screamed attorney,

  “Oh thanks, Vincent. Glad to hear y’all liked it.”

  “Dorian asked me to commend you personally,” he said. The man seemed ill, or maybe just tired. He nodded briskly, then vanished.

  “Who was that?” Bella asked.

  “Mister Robledo,” Rodney said, not looking away from his phone. “He handles the business aspects of the estate.”

  “He’s been here for forty years,” Chloe said. “Longer than anyone.”

  “And he’s the only person, besides the lord himself, allowed on the upper floors.”

  “We don’t clean them?” Bella asked.

  “No one does,” Rodney said. “Oh, we used to, but as soon as the little lord moved in, he banished us all from them. Said we couldn’t be trusted with what was within.”

  “But don’t you go up there to, like, buttle him?”

  Rodney shrugged. “There’s a suite of rooms on the second floor that I meet him in. The rest is off limits and locked with a key. Honestly it makes my job easier. I think we should lock up the entire place save for the rooms we use, but Agatha won’t hear of it. She still remembers when this house was full of Winterborns and acts like it’ll happen again any day.”

  A soft chime sounded and Rodney and Chloe jumped up from the table. “See you for dinner?” Chloe asked, smiling at Bella. She was clearly excited to have someone else around that wasn’t Agatha or Rodney. Bella nodded and Chloe wrapped her arms around her in a surprise hug.

  In a low whisper Chloe said, “Don’t take the coins, okay?”

  “What coins?” Bella asked, recoiling from the strange girl.

  But Chloe just shrugged. “I don’t know either. They just wanted me to say that.”

  Bella returned to her duties, carefully brushing the rugs in the foyer on her hands and knees. A grand staircase rose from the floor, carved of some deep blue marble that was unlike anything she’d ever seen before. The railings were gold, or at least gold-leafed metal. Polishing them was next on Bella’s list. What had Chloe meant by “watch out for the rug” she wondered. The rug seemed perfectly fine, if a little dirty.

  While she was on her knees, she could hear Winterborn upstairs, raging at someone on the phone. She couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was unmistakable. The walls nearly shook with the violence of his voice.

  Throughout the day, the doorbell would ring in a high musical note and Rodney would appear to greet whoever had arrived. A procession of people entered in pairs or foursomes, some were professional men and women who had an attorney look about them. She knew a few of them in a distant way from work functions, but if they recognized Bella, they hid it well. But also a parade of colorful women—and one man—came to visit Winterborn, each of them more oddly dressed than the last. A young woman—younger than Chloe—in a slinky black dress and heels the color of blood came first, followed later by a wizened old crone who wore a fur coat made from what looked like weasels. Third was a man in robes with a long white beard, a walking staff, and a grandly pointed hat. He looked exactly like a wizard, there was no denying it. They each marched through the foyer, not seeing Bella as she scrubbed and polished and swept and dusted, though she saw all of them. She heard the pleasant tones Winterborn spoke to them with initially, and then the fiery tones he used when he dismissed them. The lawyers, and the witches all left the house as quickly as they could. The crone exited at a dead run, taking the steps three at a time. And when she neared the front door, Rodney was there to open it for her and to wish her a good day.

  After the first wave of attorneys and witches left, Bella couldn’t help herself and crept up the steps to listen to the second wave. The attorneys were advising Winterborn about mundane estate matters—the formation of land trusts, the disputation of wills. They were topics Bella could have discussed in her sleep but she was surprised to find that she had no interest in the questions they were answering. Wasn’t being a lawyer her calling? Shouldn’t she feel excited by the particulars of the Winter’s Breath estate? But no, she searched her feelings and found herself oddly numb. As if she’d left the part of her that wanted to be an attorney back in San Francisco, on her desk, when she’d fled.

  Who was she now, then? She couldn’t be a housemaid for the rest of her days. So what should she be? She tried to remember why she’d become an attorney in the first place. Was it to argue property disputes? To mediate a disintegrating marriage? No, of course not. She’d wanted to help people.

  When Winterborn’s pleasant voice
broke and started ranting and raving, she knew it was time to slip back downstairs. The lawyers exited with ashen faces and hollow eyes at as brisk a walk as they could manage in their loafers and heels.

  When the people dressed like witches and wizards entered his office, the eavesdropping was more fun. Bella knelt near the door and listened as her heart raced.

  “You’ve had time—months. Please tell me you have answers.” Winterborn’s voice was normal, kind even. How could he switch so quickly back and forth. It wasn’t just a temper. Tempers take time to cool. “I can’t live like this. Everyone thinks I’m a monster. I’ve had to give up everything—everything!—and I’m afraid it’s killing me. Please, good people, tell me you’ve found the key.” Winterborn laughed, but it was an anguished laugh. He sounded like a man fighting his own doom.

  For a moment, Bella remembered when her mother had told her about the cancer that was eating away at her. Her mom had put on the bravest of faces and cracked jokes about making the cancer pay rent for how much space it was occupying. Bella blinked back tears. It was hard to think about her mother. She’d been gone so long. But the pain in Winterborn’s voice was so much like the pain in her mother’s that she couldn’t fight the memories. It was as if he too knew death was coming for him, and only wanted to go with dignity.

  Was he ill? Was that the cause of his tantrums? But if he was, what was this key business? Bella felt a wave of sympathy for the man, but then remembered how he’d threatened to hurl her into the sea and the wave receded somewhat. But only somewhat.

  One of the wizards—because what else could they be?—spoke in a dry ragged voice. “Sir, you’ll be pleased to know that the location of the key has been narrowed down greatly. Previously, as you know, we were sure it was in California. Not very helpful, seeing as how this is such a big state. But we have successfully narrowed it down even further.”

  Another voice spoke. It was a woman and she had a voice like cat’s purr. “It’s on the grounds of this estate, Winterborn. We’re sure of it. We bent the whole of the Penrose necromancy division to the task, which will cost a pretty penny,” she chuckled darkly. “But we have confirmed. It’s here.”

  “But where?” Winterborn asked, a hopeless note in his voice. “The estate is enormous. Is it buried in the mountain? In a tree? In the ashes of the hunting lodge with my father’s bones? I’m running out of time, my good people. No, no, don’t tell me how long I have. I know you know, but I don’t want to know. I need to keep some hope. Please.”

  The wizard spoke again. “My lord, it’s just that the effect was meant to be temporary. We regret our part in the crafting, I assure you. If we had but known . . . ” The old man trailed off and Bella could sense a change, even through the door. Winterborn’s temper was back.

  She hurried down the stairs before he erupted. Winterborn’s voice boomed out of the office, hollering and threatening the witch and the wizard. Rodney was waiting by the front door when Bella reached the lobby. The visitors were not far behind her.

  “What is all this? What’s going on?” Bella asked him. But Rodney replied with a shrug and a wink and walked back upstairs to see if his master needed anything.

  Bella could always have asked Winterborn herself, except that every time he came downstairs, she hid. She didn’t mean to, at first, but a sense of self-preservation yanked her out of his path. The house had no shortage of hiding places. Even counting just the handful of rooms she’d cleaned, there were nooks and crannies she could have hidden in where no one would have ever found her, unless they were trying to hide as well.

  It was odd, but she realized she’d never really seen the lord. In her mind, he was this hulking brute, defined entirely by his shouted words and his shadowed presence the night before in the garden. But that didn’t jibe with the soft-voiced man in pain, begging for help. She had heard him. She’d seen his back. But she hadn’t seen him, not his face, not really. As the days crept by—with Bella growing closer to Chloe, despite the girl’s oddness, and with Rodney’s lascivious winks graduating to a hand sliding across her ass as they passed each other—her mental image of the Winterborn only grew more monstrous.

  Every day saw his fury intensify, as his parade of visitors failed to offer him what he needed. He began to lash out, striking the attorneys. The sounds were unmistakable. His bellowing voice, saying things like, “What good are you to me, then?” or “You promised answers—where are they?” or “Thieves! The lot of you are nothing but thieves!” followed by the sound of glass breaking, or wood splintering, or the dull meaty thud of Winterborn punching some man in the face. The moments where he was the calm, doomed man were fewer and farther between. Bella stopped eavesdropping—mostly because she had too much work to do, but also because she had no interest in hearing Winterborn’s rage.

  He was a monster. Bella was lucky that he hadn’t thrown her to the sea on the night he’d discovered her.

  She had nightmares about Winterborn. In them she was cleaning and used the wrong treatment on one of the tapestries, burning a hole through it with bleach. The Lord finds out and storms into the room. In her nightmares he is so tall his head scrapes the ceiling. His shoulders are wide and his arms are muscled clubs, like a gorilla’s. Chains dangle from his wrists as if he escaped from a cage. The man has snaggled teeth and tusks like a boar—there must be a reason his name doesn’t appear on any of the family portraits. He roars like a lion, grabs her by the ankles and swallows her whole. In his belly there is a massive fire and the remains of the hundred servants who quit.

  It was after one of these nightmares, which left Bella pale and tired the next day, that she took a wrong turn on the way to the eastern drawing room—there were pottery shards to clean up, a mess of food that had been hurled against the wall, and broken glass everywhere. She found herself in a room that she hadn’t explored. It was dimly lit and low ceilinged, long and bent like an elbow, with tables and chairs stacked neatly against one of the walls. Storage perhaps? She heard Rodney’s voice coming from within and went to investigate, desperate for a friendly face.

  He hadn’t quite asked her to sleep with him yet, but they both knew it was coming. He was waiting for her to get bored enough of the work to need it, and she knew it. How many other maids had he played this game with? Ten? Twenty? He was good at it. The man was pretty, in an overly polished sort of way. Would he be fun in the sack, or a selfish lover? She’d find out soon enough, but there was a game in seeing how long she could wait. Her father would be ashamed if she slept with Rodney—not that he’d spoken to her at all since she’d begun as a maid.

  Bella decided to walk deeper into the dim room, to see what Rodney was up to, to flirt a bit, if only because it meant another few minutes before she’d spend her entire day picking glass shards out of a rug.

  Rodney was hunched over a table with a light strapped to his forehead, one of those jogging lights or reading-under-the-covers lights. He was mumbling to himself, counting. Bella crept up on him, a smile on her lips. When she was behind him she poked his neck and said, “What is the meaning of this?” in her best impression of the Winterborn.

  Rodney jumped up, hurling a handful of coins hard against the wall and ceiling. He shrieked in a high voice, like Michael Jackson hitting a high note.

  “What? Why?” Rodney gasped.

  The light from his forehead blinded her in the darkness. Bella laughed. “Sorry. I’m so sorry. I just couldn’t help myself. I’ve never caught you unawares before. Here, let me help you pick these up.”

  “No!” Rodney said, a little too fast. “I’ll take care of it.”

  But it was too late. Bella was on her knees, feeling around for the coins. Her fingers slipped across the dusty floor—this room must be low on Miss Agatha’s priority list—and found two of the coins. They felt odd. Bella picked them up and held them in Rodney’s light.

  They were gold. Thick and heavy and large, with indecipherable writing on one side and a seal of some sort on the other, bearing a
flag she’d never seen before. The coins were worn, but was there really a dragon on the flag? What country had a dragon as its emblem?

  “What are these?” she asked.

  “Our little secret,” Rodney said. He was hidden in shadow and she was blinded by the light, but the smirk in his voice was unmistakable. “If you keep it our secret, there’ll be a bonus for you.”

  “You’re stealing these? From him? You must be mad.”

  “What’s mad, love, is working for a madman. The pay isn’t worth this treatment. I could make more and be treated better in service at any other estate in the country. I could be a concierge at a hotel or work public relations. I have the skillset for it. If the madman expects me to stay on here as his footstool and lackey, there will be added compensation.” He held up one of the gold coins to illustrate his point.

  It was the kind of speech that you recite to yourself as justification for doing what you knew was wrong. Every attorney had one of their own that they practiced, to convince themselves helping the rich get richer or the guilty avoid justice was the right thing to do.

  Was this how she wanted to live her life?

  Rodney’s voice changed, getting serious and honest for once. All trace of the smirk was gone. “If you tell him, he will kill me. If you tell him that I’ve stolen from him, you will have killed me. Please, promise me you won’t.”

  “Tell me what his sickness is,” Bella said. If Rodney was going to candid for once, she was going to take advantage of it. She’d never worked a trial—if she did her job right, they stayed out of the courtroom—but she remembered the mock trials from law school and how good it felt to crack a witness. She had a taste of that feeling again.

  Rodney shrugged. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Best to leave it alone, love.”

  Bella held one of the coins in her hand. The weight felt good and the metal was cool and calming.