Chapter 2 - The Kitchen Witness
The following afternoon, Adrien appeared in the servants’ kitchen for the first time in eight months.
Every conversation died on the spot. The other maids lowered their heads, and the junior cooks gripped their counters, terrified of making a single wrong move.
Elena was standing near the center island, chopping vegetables for the evening dinner service. She set down the knife slowly and faced him, her face a mask of professional calm, though her pulse hammered against her ribs.
“Where is the child?” Adrien asked, his eyes scanning the stainless-steel room.
“At preschool, sir,” Elena answered steadily.
Something flashed across his face before he could catch it—a brief, sharp shadow of disappointment.
“No problem with her attendance?” he asked, reaching for an excuse to stay.
“No. She loves it there.”
He turned away, shoving his hands into the pockets of his dark trousers.
At the doorway, however, he stopped, hesitating for a fraction of a second.
“Tell Mia I finished it.”
He walked out before Elena could respond. The kitchen remained silent long and heavy, the other staff whispering behind their hands the moment the heavy oak door clicked shut.
Weeks passed, and the rigid atmosphere of the Moretti estate began to warp in ways nobody could explain.
Adrien began appearing near the kitchen with increasingly poor excuses—checking water pressure, inspecting supply inventories, or questioning the schedule of the estate groundskeepers. Mia occasionally returned when preschool closed early or when a sudden childcare crisis left Elena with no other choice.
During those afternoons, Mia did not cower. She sorted his mail by envelope color, chattered endlessly about cartoon characters he would never watch, and eventually presented him with a crayon drawing of a crooked brown mansion and three stick figures.
The figures were labeled with unsteady letters: Mia, Elena, and Adrien.
Without a word, Adrien had taken the paper, walked over to his private study wall, and taped it right beside a centuries-old oil painting.
Elena noticed everything.
She saw the way his shoulders lost their rigid tension when Mia walked into a room. She saw how the guards stopped reaching for their holsters whenever the little girl ran down the corridor.
And she kept her distance.
That was what unsettled Adrien the most.
Everyone wanted something from Adrien Moretti. Power, protection, money, favors, or vengeance. People spent millions trying to find a chink in his armor.
Elena Rossi seemed determined to want nothing at all. She worked her shifts, collected her wages, avoided eye contact whenever possible, and treated him with the cold, polite reverence due to a dangerous employer.
Then one evening, as the sun dipped below the horizon and cast long shadows across the marble hallways, he stopped her near the library entrance.
“Your daughter asked why I live alone in a house this large,” he said quietly, blocking her path.
Elena held her metal clipboard tightly against her chest, her knuckles turning white.
“What did you tell her, sir?”
“The truth.”
“And what was that?”
Adrien’s dark gaze stayed locked on hers, unblinking.
“I don't know.”
He walked past her into the darkness of the corridor.
Elena remained where she was, a cold realization settling in her stomach. She understood now that Mia had not merely wandered through an open study door by accident.
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Her daughter had opened something in Adrien Moretti himself—a door he had kept locked for twenty-four years.
And in their world, powerful families rarely tolerated open doors for long.
