Nadia’s hand clenched, her nails biting into her palm, and for one moment she almost wanted to answer back, but then she thought of Mila’s ears, of the fragile sound her sister had fought to regain, and she swallowed her anger as if swallowing a burning coal, because Nadia knew a truth Clarissa understood far too well.

The entire cost of Mila’s treatment and her regular cochlear implant follow-up visits was listed under the Hawthorne household care budget, and ever since arriving here, Clarissa had cleverly taken control of every household expense, from groceries to the servants’ wages. The thread connecting Mila to hope now lay neatly inside the carefully groomed hand of this woman, and Clarissa understood that perfectly.

Every word Nadia spoke, every time she dared to raise her head could become an excuse for that thread to be cut. That evening, as Nadia passed the half-closed study, she accidentally heard Theodor’s voice coming from inside during a phone call, and the words he spoke made her stop short. “I owe Dragan Kovac a debt of gratitude I can’t repay in this lifetime.

” He said to the person on the other end of the line. “Without him, this family would have had nothing left to preserve.” Nadia hurried past, her heart full of confusion, not understanding why those words had engraved themselves so deeply into her memory, not knowing that one day the name Dragan Kovac and that debt of gratitude would become the only thing standing between her and the abyss.

That abyss did not come in one single fall, but step by step through humiliations Clarissa carried out so skillfully that they always seemed like accidents. One afternoon, when Nadia was called up to Clarissa’s enormous dressing room to rearrange shelves of cosmetics piled as high as a mountain, Clarissa was testing a new dye product line for her brand.

Nadia worked quietly in the corner of the room while Clarissa spoke on the phone with a business partner and held a bottle of dark dye in her hand. When Nadia walked past to place a stack of towels on a shelf, Clarissa, with a movement that no one could later prove was deliberate, tilted her wrist and let the stream of dye pour straight down the front of Nadia’s white uniform, spreading into a filthy black stain.

“My god!” Clarissa cried, her voice filled with a false irritation. “Do you have any idea what you’ve just done? Are you so clumsy that you can’t even cross a room without ruining something?” Nadia stood frozen, looking down at the uniform now blotched and ruined, knowing perfectly well that Clarissa had done it herself, but she couldn’t say a word.

Clarissa went on, her voice rising by degrees, scolding her for being careless, for being unworthy of of in a house of such standing, saying that anywhere else she would have been fired long ago. Nadia lowered her head and apologized, though in her heart each word of apology felt like a knife she was turning against herself, and she withdrew with the uniform soaked in dye she knew would never wash clean, just like the way those insults would cling to her mind.

But that was not the worst of it. A few days later, one morning while Theodore was having breakfast in the dining room, Clarissa entered with a face full of distress, holding in her hands the broken pieces of the antique teapot from the very set she had once ordered Nadia to put away.

“Theodore,” she said, her voice choked as if she were about to cry. “I don’t want to say this, but I just caught your maid breaking the family heirloom tea set. The very set you’ve always treasured.” Theodore looked up, a flash of pain passing through his eyes, then turned toward Nadia, who was standing nearby to serve. Nadia felt as if the ground had collapsed beneath her feet.

She knew exactly where that tea set had been stored, knew that she herself had wrapped it carefully and placed it deep at the bottom of the storage cabinet, and that there was only one person who had both the authority and the reason to take it out and smash it. But when she opened her mouth to defend herself, Clarissa looked at Theodore with tear-filled eyes and a wounded expression, and Nadia saw the thing she feared most appear on her kind employer’s face.

Theodore believed his wife. He sighed, set down his knife and fork, and said in a tired voice that he had not thought Nadia would be so careless, that perhaps she should be more careful from now on. He did not shout, did not punish her, but that very gentleness mixed with disappointment hurt Nadia more than any words could have, because it showed her that the only person who had once looked at her as a human being was now beginning to see her through the lens Clarissa had built.

She lowered her head and accepted blame for something she had not done, then left the room with a heavy heart. What Nadia did not know was that in the shadowed corner on the other side of the room, Mr. Oswald had witnessed everything. That night, in his small room, the old butler took out an old leather-covered notebook, turned on the desk lamp, and with the neat handwriting of a man who had worked carefully his whole life, he began recording each incident, each date, each spoken word, quietly and patiently.

He did not know what these pages would be used for, or whether the day would ever come when they would be needed, but he was certain of one thing, that the truth had to be preserved somewhere. So, when that day came, it would not be buried beneath lies. And that day might not be far off, because in only a few weeks, Theodore’s mother, the most powerful woman in the Hawthorne family, would come to visit.

Before Theodore’s mother could set foot in the mansion, someone else returned to the house. And this time his presence would record something no one expected. Dragan Kovac came back late one afternoon to discuss the final terms related to the port division, a meeting Theodore had been waiting for over many weeks.

He was shown into the study with his silent bodyguard. And while Theodore went to fetch several files from the adjoining room, Dragan stood alone beside the large window, quietly watching the garden sink into the shadow of dusk. It was at that very moment, through the half-open door leading to the hallway, that he heard a voice.

👉 [Tap here for Next Part] 👈