Chapter 9 Eliza #2
It was how wild bears got rescued when they were wounded.
It was why, when people heard someone crying for help from a well, they focused on helping and didn’t think of the psycho clown that could be waiting in the shadows.
Our bodies buzzed with the instinct to help, to save.
That’s how I felt—terrified yet needed and useful.
For now, though, without answers, I let the locket rest against my heart, a silent companion, carrying with it the promise of something I couldn’t yet name—perhaps my own bit of hope.
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Even this late in the afternoon in the conservatory, I could still feel a mournful chill in the outside air that occasionally flowed in through the broken panels.
The heavy smell of moss and the earthy scent of rot swirled together in the stagnant space.
The scent seemed to be lessening the more attention I paid to it, though a layer of dust and pollen still coated everything in sight.
The windows cast warm golden streams and squares of light across the garden.
I knelt by the koi pond, feeling the sharp pressure on my knees as I continued scrubbing at the moss that had choked the edges of the pond’s stone perimeter.
I only needed to clear it away a bit more and then I could switch positions, relieving my kneecaps.
Everything seemed to ache today, forcing me to realize how little physical labor my job as a botanist actually entailed comparatively.
Sowerby was brash and grumpy, but there was a softness to his edges, even if he fought it.
Still, there was something a bit off about him, something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
Likely it was just my paranoia, but I couldn’t help wondering if he was simply keeping tabs on me and my activities inside the manor.
There was something dark sitting beneath his surface.
Unable to stay on my knees another second, I moved to the edge of the water feature.
The soil was damp from where I’d watered it, yielding beneath my fingers as I pulled up clumps of weeds and scattered them aside, making sure to leave the pretty, flowering purslane and groundsel to the side for a nightstand bouquet.
The task was simple, almost meditative, but there was a pressure sitting on my chest—a weight that had nothing to do with the decayed pond or the neglect that stained every inch of this glass room.
It had everything to do with the man I could feel just beyond my peripheral vision.
Jasper.
His presence lingered in the air of the conservatory like a storm waiting to break, and I couldn’t escape it. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. I felt like a storm chaser on the edge of an EF5 tornado, knowing I should have left long ago but unable to stop watching the spinning cyclone.
Refusing to acknowledge him first, I tried to focus on my work, on the trowel in my hand, on the feel of the rough stone beneath my palms and the musty earth scent in my nose, but my thoughts refused to stray and kept returning to him.
He was everything the house was—dark, distant, brooding, and horrifying, covered up with a beautifully expensive varnish.
There was an intensity in him that I didn’t fully understand, a quiet sorrow.
I’d seen it in his eyes, felt it in the silence between his words.
Was that what happened when you became a murderer? Or did something else happen?
I wanted to hate him. I despised him for what he’d gotten away with, but instead of hate, I found I mostly feared him and the things he was capable of. Sometimes I was reminded that I was sleeping in the tiger’s cage—a tiger that was thought to have killed before and could easily kill again.
The scrape of my trowel against the stone was too sharp, too jarring against the stillness; it felt like a cry for help. I almost expected him to say something. But there was nothing but the deep quiet stretching between us.
And then, just as the thought flickered across my mind, his voice cut through the silence, low and gravelly. It snaked through my chest like it was my own vibrating breath.
“I heard you needed help this morning.”
I could feel him standing in the doorway, watching me, his eyes like a force pressing on my skin and nerves.
I didn’t acknowledge him. I’d been in my own head in the silence of the garden for too long, and I wasn’t sure how to take his words or his presence.
Had he come to fight with me for not doing the job alone and having Sowerby help?
I shrank in on myself, hoping he’d just go away.
I continued pulling weeds from the pond, pretending the sound of his voice didn’t rattle through me like an unexpected thunderclap.
My eyes suddenly caught the way my soil-streaked fingers had begun to tremble.
“I heard you needed help this morning,” he repeated, as if testing my reaction, the words curling between us like smoke.
His voice had a slight rasp to it now, the words too soft, too deliberate—almost…
kind. It was like he was forcing himself to speak, like he didn’t want to but couldn’t avoid it. “I just spoke with Sowerby.”
I could feel the flicker of something in his words, an undercurrent of challenge, of disapproval, but also something else—something I couldn’t quite name.
It frustrated me how often I felt that with the people in this house, like they were all hiding something.
I’d originally assumed that all the clipped words and nervous looks from the staff were born from fear of Jasper, but after seeing the ghost in the red dress, I wondered if it was something more.
I needed to say something. He wasn’t going away, and I was making it awkward.
As much as I hated the man, I still needed him to not fire me and throw me out of the manor.
“Yes, he was incredibly helpful,” I answered with a polite, humorless smile.
My eyes stayed on the pond with my focus fixed on the task at hand.
Still, I felt the need to fill the silence with something—anything.
“I hope that doesn’t negate our deal. The filter was too heavy for me to lift, and he volunteered. I assumed it would be okay.”
He stepped forward, his polished boots creaking softly against the worn stone pavers, but I still didn’t look up.
I could feel his presence growing larger, more imposing, like a rain cloud gathering in the distance.
I curled my body in a little, trying to make myself smaller, more compact, while respectfully redirecting my focus elsewhere.
If I’d gained any skills in my life, it was the art of invisibility.
I’d mastered the subtle art of being forgotten.
I kept working, knowing he’d turn and leave any second.
He didn’t.
“Sowerby isn’t as young as he thinks he is,” he said, his voice dropping lower, quieter now, like he was testing the very air between us. “And I’d hate to be left without my butler.”
His words hit harder than I’d expected. They were quiet, but they were laced with genuine care for his aging staff—something that irked me more than I cared to admit.
I wanted them to be cold, dismissive, but they weren’t.
They challenged me in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
My hands stayed frozen on the stone, the trowel stuck halfway through its scrape.
I didn’t answer right away—not because I didn’t know the answer, but because I was afraid of what the answer might mean.
God forbid the man have any redeeming qualities to add to the mess swirling in my mind.
“I thought Sowerby had mentioned you were leaving for business,” I said finally, my voice steadier than I felt.
I didn’t meet his gaze, but I felt it on me all the same.
Instead of him growing bored and leaving, I felt him staring at me, watching me in a way that made me aware of every part of my body.
It was like he was trying to look inside of me, past the surface, past my carefully constructed mask.
He didn’t reply at first, just watched me with that unnerving silence of his.
I wanted to break it, to fill the space with noise, anything to make the tension between us more bearable.
But it lingered. Was it because he was so attractive?
Was that the source of this tension? Had I created it?
I hated myself for it. He was a cold, awful murderer.
Why did I have to remind myself of that so frequently?
“Katya told me you would be away on business for the next three months,” I said, unable to hide the annoyance creeping into my tone.
“Something here keeps me,” he muttered under his breath, almost as if speaking to himself, as though the words were too much for him to say directly.
“Is it the addition? I thought they were almost done. That’s what Katya said. I never see the workers, even when I go outside.”
He ignored me. “This really does seem like too much work for one person. This place isn’t…what it once was.”
His words were softer now as he surveyed the conservatory, but no less intense. They hung in the air between us, sharp and raw, as if they’d been waiting to be released for a long time—like he wasn’t just talking about the manor, but about something else entirely.
As he spoke, there was an understanding in his tone that complicated things more than I could handle, like maybe he wasn’t as cold and horrible as the rumors would have me believe.
It was confounding. The nerves in my body were strung tighter than a harp.
His wistful words about the state of the manor felt unrehearsed and genuine, confusing me still more.