Chapter 9 - Unwritten Histories
Matteo lowered the flashlight slightly, casting a dim, ambient glow across the floor as he knelt to inspect the bootprints more closely. The beam illuminated a discarded plastic wrapper half-buried in the dust near the rusted iron lever. It was a brand of instant coffee sold only at the small grocery store down the highway by the county line—the exact same store where my mother bought provisions before her shifts at the estate. A cold dread pooled in my stomach, competing with the residual warmth of the soup I had eaten earlier.
"Do you recognize this?" Matteo asked, holding the crumpled wrapper up between two fingers. His voice was dangerously calm, stripped of all its usual corporate authority, leaving only raw, searching curiosity.
I shook my head slowly, though my throat felt entirely too tight to speak. I couldn't tell him that my mother had often talked about strange drafts in the old service quarters, or how she suspected the estate had hidden spaces that weren't on the official blueprints. If Matteo thought my family had been sneaking around his private quarters for months, he would throw us out into the freezing American rain without a second thought, sick mother and sleeping infant alike.
"It's just store trash," I managed to whisper, my voice cracking slightly. "People drop things everywhere."
Matteo stood up slowly, towering over me in the cramped subterranean corridor. He turned his gaze from the floor to my face, his dark eyes searching mine with an intensity that felt impossible to evade. He didn't look angry; he looked analytical, piecing together a puzzle that had more missing pieces than he cared to admit. He knew I was hiding something, but for the first time since he had caught me vacuuming in the library, the wall between his world and mine felt permeable.
May you like
"Mia," he said quietly, the harshness completely gone from his tone. "Your mother isn't just a routine cleaner, is she? And this house... it was built long before my grandfather bought it. My family bought the title, but we didn't build the foundations."
The admission hung in the damp air between us, heavy with the weight of generations of secrets. Before I could formulate a reply, another sharp rap echoed against the far wall of the tunnel—closer this time, right beneath our feet.
