Chapter IV— "All men are the same!"

...Sephera's POV ...

There is something unnerving about kindness when you’ve spent years learning how to live without it.

Grismore Manor was too quiet.

The hallways didn’t creak the way my bones did. The firelight didn’t hum the way Dante’s voice once had. Everything here was orderly, elegant, untouched by grief. I walked through the rooms like an ink stain across parchment — wrong, but too small to erase.

I was kept as a maid, though my hands hadn’t held polish or silver since Dante’s old quarters — where the windows were always cracked and the curtains smelled of smoke. I’d taken care of him then. Of his books. His crumpled scripts. His moods.

Now, I took care of rooms no one entered. Cleaned things that were already clean.

And yet, he — Elias Grismore — kept watching me.

He didn’t bark orders. He didn’t leer. He didn’t hover like the shopkeeper did. But he watched, and that unsettled me more than all the others combined.

His gaze wasn’t hungry. It was… curious.

That made it worse.

---

He tried to speak to me once in the conservatory, as I dusted the rim of a harp that hadn’t been played in years.

“You always seem to know which corners are forgotten.”

I didn’t answer. I moved to the next shelf.

“Is it instinct?” he tried again. “Or have you always preferred being where no one looks?”

I paused.

Why are you asking me that?

What are you trying to see?

I knew men who hid their intentions behind polite questions. Gentle words that turned sharper the moment they were refused.

So I said nothing.

He didn't press. He only offered a faint, almost disappointed smile and stepped back, giving me space. Too much space, almost as if he knew that I’d mistake closeness for threat.

---

Over the next few days, I kept to myself.

I ate alone, if I ate at all.

I cleaned quietly, passing other maids like a ghost in the corridors. They called me “the storm-eyed girl” when they thought I couldn’t hear. One of them, Anette, had once tried to make conversation while folding linens, but I replied in a single word. She never tried again.

It was easier that way.

Easier to be alone than to give anyone the chance to ask: Who are you?

Because I wasn’t sure anymore.

Not Dante’s. Not my mother’s. Not even my own.

Just a body moving through rooms that weren’t mine, held together by quiet and memory.

---

Still… Elias noticed me.

His green eyes always caught me when I thought I was hidden. I saw him watching from the second floor as I swept the garden path. I saw the way he paused in conversation when I entered a room. It wasn’t lust. It wasn’t even admiration.

It was concern.

But concern is just another leash.

And I don’t wear leashes anymore.

Let him wonder who I was.

Let him try his gentle questions and careful silences.

I’d been loved before.

And it had broken me more than hatred ever could.

So I kept my eyes low, my voice quiet, and my heart buried in places no one could find.

Especially not him.

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