The silence grew thicker, a suffocating blanket. I couldn't just agree that he was right, but my throat had sealed itself shut, packed with the gravel of four years of unsaid words. To speak was to risk everything disintegrating.
"The next time you come late like this," he said, his voice now chillingly calm, "just know you'll be leaving this office. Sacked. Now arrange this place."
He didn't wait. He was gone. The door sighed shut, leaving me alone in the space he had defiled.
A furious, helpless heat rose in my chest, but it was a distant flame, guttering out before it could catch. What was the point? Fire required fuel, and I was just ash.
Why should I be the one to do this?
The thought was a weak echo in the cavern of my skull. He was the one who scattered this place. Not me.
Mechanically, my body moving on some awful autopilot learned from years of tidying up other people's messes, I approached the desk. I righted a toppled stack of books, my fingers leaving no imprint. I straightened a pen.
Then, shifting a heavy ledger, I saw it.
His sperm!!!
A smear. Thick, opaque, and drying on the polished edge of the mahogany.
My brain refused the shape of it for a second. Then it clicked—vile and absolute.
No.
It was his. On the desk he had just ordered me to clean.
It wasn't just an order. It was a sacrament of degradation. A silent command to kneel and erase the physical evidence of his act, to become the keeper of his filth. To touch it.
A sound tore from my throat—not a scream, but a raw, gagging "Ahhhhhhhhhh!"—that was swallowed whole by the soundproofed, indifferent walls. It was the same sound that had been stuck in my chest the night Bran died. A sound of ultimate, helpless violation.
I cleaned it. With a shaking hand and a cloth I would later burn in my mind, I wiped his stain away. The act felt less like tidying and more like a funeral rite for my own dignity. I was burying something, and I was the grave.
---
I left his office, the hallway tilting on its axis. The polished floor, the muted clicks of keyboards—they were a film over the real world, a world that now felt permanently stained. My legs carried me on a numb, familiar path to the only place that made sense: the cleaners' tomb.
The room was a cave of broken things, smelling of ammonia and damp concrete—the tang of futility. I pushed the door open, wanting to disappear among the broken mop handles and dented buckets.
Mara was inside, the blue light of her phone painting her face in ghostly strokes. She was somewhere else, in a world that didn't smell of despair. I envied her escape.
I fell into the empty chair, its plastic groaning under a weight it couldn't see. The loneliness was a cold companion breathing the same chemical air.
My hands trembled as I fumbled for my phone. The screen was a blur.
One Piece!
Who wouldn't love this anime?
The theme song was a lifeline thrown across years. For a few precious minutes, I could be on that ship. The sea was boundless, the laughter was real, and no one died from being loved. I clung to it, my eyes burning with tears I wouldn't let fall for my own life, but which fell freely for a rubber boy who wanted to be King.
"Camilla! Camilla!"
A sharp tap. The world shattered. The sea drained away, leaving me beached in the closet. My phone slipped from my fingers, clattering to the floor. I looked at Mara, irritation flashing—a brief, fragile spark. "Do you have a problem?"
"Camilla, Mrs. Elara is looking for you."
Elara.
The name was a spike of cold iron through my chest. The sister. The inheritor of a shared loss that had only bred poison.
"Why didn't she just find you?" I snapped, the fear making my voice brittle.
Mara shrugged, already half-gone. "She's your sister-in-law. You should go serve her."
Serve her.
The words were the final brick in a wall I couldn't climb. I stood, the ghost of Bran's hand on my shoulder—a memory of support so faint it might have been imagination. He wasn't here to step between us anymore. I was alone.
---
I knocked. Thud. Thud. The sound was swallowed by the plush silence of her domain.
"Camilla, don't break the door. Come in, you fool."
I entered, the scent of her perfume—something expensive and icy—washing over me. It was the scent of the lost mansion, and it always made my grief feel cheap.
"Good morning," I said, forcing my gaze to hers. I braced for the storm.
She was perfect. A sculpture of controlled elegance.
She slowly crossed her legs, a deliberate, powerful gesture. Her eyes, however, were the only part of her that seemed alive, and they were full of a bright, unholy fire.
"You fool," she hissed. "Don't you know how to add a title to my nam—"
"Good morning, ma'am." I cut her off, the title a piece of armor offered in surrender.
The silence that followed was a living thing. It pulsed with all the words we never said: You took my brother. You live in his house. You breathe his air.
She picked up a single sheet of paper. Held it and let it go.
It fluttered, a slow, dying thing, to the floor at my feet.
"Pick this up." Her smile was a wound.
My grief welled up, thick and choking. This wasn't just dominance. This was a weekly mourning ritual in reverse.
She wasn't laying flowers on a grave; she was making me kneel on it. For her, I was the grave. Every time she made me bend, she was burying him again, and shoveling the dirt on me.
The weight of it all—Bran's absence, the secret of the desk, the exhaustion in my cells—pressed down.
My shoulders curved, not just in submission, but under the sheer mass of missing him. I missed him so violently that my knees buckled from the longing, not the command.
I bent, a sob locked behind my teeth, my hand reaching out, trembling toward the paper.
Then—impact.
A searing, white-hot corona of pain exploded across the back of my skull. The world dissolved into a symphony of terrible sounds—the ceramic shriek of the mug exploding, the wet, hot deluge soaking through my hair and uniform, my own gasp choked by steam.
The smell of bitter coffee engulfed me, but all I could smell for a split second was the stale, terrified scent of our bedroom four years ago.
The heat on my neck wasn't coffee; it was the memory of his skin going cold against mine.
I stumbled forward, my hand smacking the wet floor, the paper disintegrating into pulp beneath my palm.
A shard of the mug—white with a delicate gold rim, from a set Bran bought her for a birthday long ago—lay next to my fingers, gleaming like a cruel smile.
The physical pain was a gateway. It flung me back into the oldest, deepest hurt. The humiliation was fresh, but the grief was ancient, a bedrock layer of my soul.
The hot liquid seeped through to my skin, and I couldn't tell if I was burning now or then, if I was crying for the stain on my uniform or the eternal stain on my life.
Bran...my love was gone and It was all my fault!
She hadn't just wanted to hurt me. She wanted to touch the bruise that never healed. She wanted to prove that the pain was still there, raw and available, just under the surface.
In the stunned, ringing silence, as coffee dripped from my hair onto the ruined paper, the rules didn't just feel gone. They felt like they had never existed. There was only the before, and the after, and this endless, terrible now.
Slowly, pushing against the pain in my head and the weight of four years, I raised myself from the floor. I turned to face her, the coffee running in warm rivulets down my neck and back. My eyes, wide and clear for the first time in years, met hers.
"Elara…" The name came out not as a whisper, but as a statement. Low, steady, and final. Strangled by steam but solid with a new, terrible understanding.
"This is enough."
------------------------
To be continued...