Chapter 34
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
My eyes shot open to a dark room and a darker figure hunching over me. I squeezed them closed and took a deep breath. My first thought was always the same.
Don’t fight. Just let it happen.
The sick bastards liked it when you fought. They liked it more when they had an excuse to fight you back. A reason to kill you. I wouldn’t give them that reason. The other women needed me here. I needed to be here.
“Get up, girl. I know you ain’t sleeping,” Nina hissed, and my eyes shot open again.
I pushed myself up on the bed, threw the covers aside, and swung my legs over the mattress. My feet already sliding into the slippers I’d left on the floor. Just in case I had to run.
“Is Maria okay?”
Nina didn’t answer, just jutted her head forward and signaled for me to follow her. “Come on, now. We don’t have much time.”
“Much time for what?”
She shook her head and pressed a finger to her lips as she led me out of the room.
She continued along the windy hallway in the servants’ corridor, guided by instinct and not much else.
We didn’t have any windows, no real way to tell what time of day it was when all the lights were switched off.
The family had them set on a panel. They wanted to control everything, including what we could see and when.
We may have been several floors down from where they slept, either passed out from overindulging in wine or coming off their high, too far away for any of them to hear us. But it didn’t matter how quiet you were. In a house like this, every stone and floorboard and wall groaned.
I used to find it eerie. Now it just felt inconvenient. Like whenever Mr. Prescott or one of his henchmen wasn’t watching you, the house was doing it for them.
Nina didn’t peer back at me again until we were standing in the middle of an empty bedroom. She carefully clicked the door closed and locked it. We both knew it didn’t matter. Whoever we didn’t want getting in had a key anyway.
She shuffled over to the opposite end of the room and slowly started nudging a bookshelf away from the wall.
When she flicked her eyes in my direction, I rushed over to help her.
By the time we had it far enough to see what was behind it, Nina was lifting a giant tapestry and stepping through a secret door.
She quickly turned around on the threshold, shoved me to the side, and started tugging the bookshelf back into place.
Which was a lot easier to do with the metal hooks someone had had the foresight to attach there.
She glanced over at me, pushed me forward, and closed the door behind us before pulling a flashlight from her apron and switching it on.
I blinked a few times, my eyes trying to adjust from the total blackness to the bright-yellow hue now lighting up the set of stone stairs in front of us.
Nina tugged on my sleeve, holding onto my shoulder for support, and I slowly made my way down, one slippery step at a time before we found ourselves at the bottom.
“Mr. Prescott has a lot of secrets,” she grumbled, catching her breath and holding on to the closest wall. Nina was only about twenty years older than I was. You wouldn’t know that by looking at her, though. This place had a way of aging you… “But so do we.”
“We?” I repeated. I was half awake and not entirely prepared for whatever secret-society, middle-of-the-night initiation I appeared to be walking myself into—without much of a fight, it seemed.
“Us.” Nina nodded. “And now… you.”
“Why me?”
Nina knew what I was asking her. The question was double-edged. Why me then and why me now?
I should have held some sort of grudge towards the woman for bringing me on, knowing what everyone knew once they got here. I didn’t. I was curious, not angry. Or maybe I was just so angry I was numb.
“Because I knew you wouldn’t leave. Because I knew you would take care of my girls,” she replied simply. Nina only had one daughter, Justine, but she considered all the women who worked here her girls.
She cursed at a few rocks in her way and then she was walking farther down the long tunnel that appeared to lead to more blackness. Expecting me to follow her, and of course I did.
I peered up at the stone ceiling above us, at the stone walls on each side of us, at the stretch of pitch blackness in front of us. “Where are we?” I asked.
“Under Prescott Estates,” she answered like it was obvious. She was right, but it didn’t make it any less weird.
“Where does it go?”
“Everywhere,” she replied just as cryptically.
We didn’t stop walking until we were climbing up another set of stairs, pushing out of a metal door, and standing in the middle of the woods out back of the estate.
I glanced over a shoulder at the large manor behind us, faux candlelight flickering in the windows and the occasional curtain swaying when someone brushed by it.
It was odd to say a house was menacing but Prescott Estates was just that. It seemed to stare at you from a distance, like it knew what happened within its walls and it was cautioning you to stay away or daring you to step closer.
A shiver ran up my spine, and I turned back around. Nina was already headed deeper into the woods. Her steps quick for someone with such little legs.
I caught up to her in two strides. “Where are we going now?” I whispered, afraid my voice would carry in the wind. I tugged my nightgown closer to my chest. If I knew we were taking this excursion outside, I would have grabbed my robe first.
“Over to the old well,” Nina whispered back.
“What’s over by the old well?”
“You’ll see.”