Chapter 20 – Chrissy
Chapter
Twenty
CHRISSY
“I said I want peonies, not whatever the fuck this is!”
We all paused.
“That is what is in the cooler, ma’am,” a staff voice answered, thinner, strained. “We don’t have—”
“Then go get some,” the contestant snapped. “What is the point of all this money if I have to look at cheap flowers that look like they were grown in that messy, overgrown garden out back like some middle-class nobody?”
Mei’s mouth flattened into a hard line and Jacob’s eyes darkened.
A second later, something crashed somewhere down the hall.
Porcelain? Glass? It was impossible to tell.
A maid yelped. Then there was that horrible wet silence of someone swallowing tears.
Mei made some kind of hand signal at Jacob, grabbed a vase of flowers she’d brought in just a few minutes ago, and stepped out of the room.
“Keep working,” Jacob said under his breath, jaw tight. “Henry will handle it.”
I swallowed hard and forced my gaze back to the cloth in my hand.
I knew that tone. My own bosses had used it a dozen times when clients crossed lines and we just had to smile and suffer through it.
We’d barely gone back to dusting when the tension walked itself right into our room.
Mei came in first, one arm wrapped around the shoulders of another maid who was carrying a fresh vase with nervous hands. Her cheeks were pink, eyes damp. The new vase was… fine. Generic. Flowers from downstairs — white roses this time — nodded over the rim.
“Sorry,” Mei said. “We needed the other one somewhere else.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Somewhere peonies are in high demand.”
Mei’s lips twitched, but she didn’t answer. The maid set the vase on the tall display table, fingers trembling.
“Thank you,” I said to her. “It’s lovely, and I appreciate you.”
She startled a little at being directly addressed, then ducked her head.
“You’re welcome, miss.”
As she turned, her hip clipped the corner of the table.
The vase toppled.
For a second, all three of us watched it fall, gazes all locked on the white curve, the flash of blue, the spill of water arcing out.
It hit the stone hearth and shattered into a million pieces, scattered among the white roses. Water splashed across the freshly beaten rug. Flowers rolled like casualties across the floor. The maid made a strangled noise, hands flying to her mouth.
“Oh no,” she whispered. “Oh no, oh no, oh no…”
“It’s fine,” I said automatically, even as my brain replayed the sound of Number Fourteen’s hand cracking across a maid’s face in some other room down the hall just a few minutes ago. “Hey. Hey, it’s okay. It was an accident.”
“You don’t understand,” she whispered, eyes glistening. “That was one of Mr. Stonewood’s—” She cut herself off, swallowing hard like the name itself might be dangerous. “He likes that one. Henry said — if — if anything happened—”
Her voice broke. Something cold and dreadful slid down my spine.
I glanced at the wreckage. The vase wasn’t salvageable.
I lowered myself into a crouch in front of the cowering maid, ignoring the way my thighs screamed and my bruises twinged.
“Hey,” I said, deliberately putting myself between her and the door. “Look at me.”
Her wide green eyes met mine.
“It’s a thing,” I said. “A very pretty thing, sure, but it’s still just a thing. No matter how much it cost, it’s not worth more than your job. Or your face. Or your teeth. Okay?”
Her mouth trembled, but she gave me a reluctant nod.
“Let me help you clean it up,” I said. “If anybody’s going to be mad it broke, they can be mad at me. I asked for more stuff up here. I’m the one who wanted the room changed. It happened on my watch.”
“You don’t have to do that,” she whispered, shaking her head.
“Yes, I do,” I said. “I’m the idiot contestant, remember? I signed a contract saying I’d play this game. You didn’t.”
“She’s right,” Jacob said quietly. He’d moved closer without me noticing, shadows under his eyes gone darker. “You were doing your job. The rest is on us.”
Mei’s gaze flicked between the three of us, something sharp and assessing behind her worry.
“Henry is going to ask who was in the room,” she said.
“Great,” I said. “You can tell him it was my fault.”
“Chrissy—” Jacob began.
“No,” I said, heat rising in my chest. “I’m serious. I know how people like Fourteen think. They think staff exists to absorb damage for them. I am not going to be that girl.”
Jacob opened his mouth like he was going to argue with me again, and I glowered at him until he shut it.
I looked back at the maid.
“If Mr. Stonewood has a problem with what happened in this room, he can take it up with me and no one else.”
Her eyes searched my face like she was trying to figure out if I was crazy.
Maybe I was, because the moment the words left my mouth, my body remembered the last time I’d been alone with him. The way his voice had wrapped around the word punishment, low and amused. The sting of his palm. The humiliating, devastating heat of my own response to it.
“Are you sure?” Mei asked softly.
I thought of Granny, small and fragile in her bed at the hospice, eyes going cloudy, nurses wiping her brow with such care.
Of my parents scoffing about the cost every time I sent in another payment, even though they weren’t paying it.
Of the way they’d said, ‘She’s old, Christina.
People die’, like that made it okay to leave her scared and alone.
“Yeah,” I said. My throat felt tight, but my voice stayed steady. “I’m sure.”
Mei nodded once, like she’d been waiting for that. “Then we should clean this up quickly,” she said. “So no one cuts themselves.” She gave the maid a pointed look. “You can go finish your other tasks. I’ll speak to Henry.”
The maid hesitated.
“Are you… are you really…?”
“If there’s trouble,” I said, straightening up, “it hits me first. Okay?”
Her eyes went shiny again, but this time there was a different emotion in them.
“Thank you,” she whispered, and fled.
As soon as she was gone, my legs gave a little wobble. Jacob’s hand shot out, steadying me by the elbow.
“You didn’t have to do that,” he said, voice low and rough. “You know that, right?”
I looked up at him, at the scar that slashed through his eyebrow, the one that pulled the corner of his mouth just a touch when he was trying not to show what he was feeling.
“If you think I can stand here in this house and watch someone get hurt over a damn vase without saying anything,” I said, “you haven’t been paying attention.”
Something flared in his gaze. Pride. Fear. Something darker threaded through them both.
“He won’t like you interfering,” Jacob said.
My pulse skittered.
“He can add it to the list.”
“Chrissy.” My name left his mouth like a warning. Or a prayer. “You’re putting yourself in his crosshairs on purpose.”
“I’ve been in his crosshairs since my tire blew and I showed up late,” I said. “At least this way I know where he’s aiming, and it’s not at innocent people who don’t deserve it.”
“Mr. Stonewood is the way he is for a reason,” Jacob sighed.
“I don’t care why he is the way he is, I just care that he directs his anger at me and not at that poor maid. She’s been through enough today already, having to deal with Fourteen.”
That wasn’t entirely true. There was still a long list of reasons I hadn’t begun to untangle. Why invite women here at all? Why structure it like a horror movie pretending to be The Bachelor? Why me?
But right now, the only why that mattered was that a girl who made less in a month than my grandmother’s facility charged in a day wasn’t going to be the one paying for a rich man’s temper tantrum.
Mei handed me a small trash bag, her face composed again.
“Be careful,” she said. “The edges can cut you.”
I crouched back down and started collecting the broken pieces, dropping them gently into the bag. The fragments clinked softly against each other. My hands shook just a little.
Every shard I picked up felt like I was digging myself in deeper. Every soft thud into the plastic was another notch on some invisible tally in a powerful man’s head.
Sassed him about the contract. Kissed Jacob. Defended the staff. Offered myself up in the maid’s place.
If Ben Stonewood was the kind of person who saw people as problems to be solved with punishment and reward, I had just painted a bullseye on my own ass in neon paint… again.
Jacob knelt opposite me, helping gather the larger pieces. His fingers brushed mine over one chunk, callused and warm. His eyes met mine, searching, conflicted.
“You really going to tell Henry it was you?” he asked quietly.
“Yeah,” I said. “And if Mr. Stonewood wants someone’s head over it, he can have mine.”
My heart hammered harder just saying it.
Memories flashed uninvited — the sound of his footsteps approaching the bed last night, the slide of his fingers along the elastic of my panties, the way he’d made me cry out with each strike of his hand until I could barely remember my own name.
You take it like a good girl, you get to stay in the game.
Shame flushed hot under my skin. Not at what he’d done. At what my body hadn’t been able to pretend it didn’t want.
“Chrissy.” Jacob’s voice anchored me. “You know what happens when you put yourself between him and something he thinks is his business?”
I tied the top of the trash bag in a hard knot and rose, my legs protesting.
“Yeah,” I said, forcing myself to meet his gaze. “He gets mad and he decides I need to be taught a lesson.”
I swallowed, the back of my neck prickling.
Jacob went eerily quiet, just staring at me as he rose to his full height, towering over me.
“And then he does something about it.”
My words sat heavy between us. Mei’s quiet movements, gathering stray petals and damp cloths, faded into the background. The library — cleaner, brighter, alive again — suddenly felt less like a room and more like a very pretty cage.
Jacob’s jaw flexed and he looked away.
“You don’t have to like it,” he said, so soft I barely heard him. “You don’t have to let him see it if you do.”
Heat slammed through me, low and treacherous. My bruises throbbed in phantom memory. I swallowed again, hard, and forced myself to breathe.
“It doesn’t matter how I feel about it,” I said. “He’s still going to do what he wants.”
Mei looked up then, eyes sharp.
“I will speak to Henry,” she said. “You should finish what you can in here before the bell. There is still work to be done.”
There was always still work to be done. She left with the bag of broken vase, her back very straight. The moment the door clicked shut behind her, Jacob dragged a hand over his face, exhaling slowly.
“You’re going to be the death of me,” he muttered.
“Join the club,” I said weakly.
We finished the last little touches in silence, straightening a chair here, fluffing a pillow there, adjusting the lamp so it cast a warm pool of light over the reading nook by the window.
From the doorway, the room looked… cozy and inviting, like someone might walk in any second, shrug out of their coat, and lose themselves for a few hours.
“There,” I said softly. “If this doesn’t win us whatever points he’s giving out today, I don’t know what will.”
Jacob didn’t answer. His gaze wasn’t on the room. It was on the doorway, on the empty space where Mei had just walked out, carrying a bag of evidence and my name. A bell rang somewhere in the house, clear and final.
“Time’s up,” I sighed.
Across the property, all of the women probably dropped paintbrushes and mood boards and fought over whose vision had been better. I stood in the middle of a resurrected library and felt the countdown start in my bones.
At some point between now and when my head hit the pillow tonight, Henry was going to knock on a door. Or Mr. Stonewood was going to appear like a summoned demon. Someone was going to bring up a broken vase and a maid and ask who should pay for it.
And I had just volunteered.
I curled my fingers into my palms, feeling the cool bite of my ring press into my skin, the ghosts of last night’s punishment burning hot beneath my bruises.
Fear slid icy fingers down my spine at the thought of what he might do to me this time.
Right behind it, just as awful, came the flicker of something else.
Something shameful and needy and hungry that I couldn’t pretend wasn’t there, no matter how hard I tried.
I had no idea how Ben Stonewood would choose to make me pay for opening my big mouth this time, but as I turned toward the door, heart pounding, one terrible truth settled in my chest like a stone.
For the first time since I arrived at this lodge, I wasn’t just afraid of being punished, I was afraid of how much a part of me wanted to find out exactly what he’d do.