Chapter 2 - The Sound Behind the Door
By late afternoon, the mansion had grown unnaturally quiet. Mrs. Herrera had left for her afternoon administrative rounds in the east wing, giving me a rare hour to myself to finish sanitizing the secondary guest rooms on the upper floor.
As I carried a basket of damp towels down the secondary corridor, I heard it.
It wasn't a loud sound. It was faint, muffled, and entirely out of place in a house where everything was supposed to be dead and buried.
A soft, rhythmic scraping.
Like fingernails scratching against old wood. Or a small toy rolling across a hardwood floor.
I froze halfway down the hallway, my heart leaping into my throat. My boots made no sound against the thick wool runner as I crept closer, drawn by an irresistible, terrifying curiosity. The sound was coming from behind the locked door—the one at the far end of the second-floor corridor. The room Mrs. Herrera had warned me about with such venomous finality.
“Some doors in this house are sealed for a reason, Elena.”
I set the laundry basket down softly on the floor and took two tentative steps forward. The heavy brass handle looked ancient, completely out of sync with the ultra-modern smart locks installed everywhere else in the Cárdenas Tower estate. I reached out a trembling hand, hovering my fingertips just an inch away from the cold metal. Was there a key hidden somewhere nearby? Did Mr. Cárdenas keep a spare in his study?
Click.
A sudden, sharp noise from the main stairway made me recoil as if I’d been burned.
I spun around. Rodrigo Cárdenas stood at the head of the stairs, watching me with an expression so dark and unreadable it stopped my breath entirely. He must have come up the private elevator without me hearing the mechanism. His hands were buried deep in his trouser pockets, his broad frame blocking the only exit from the hallway.
"Did Mrs. Herrera teach you how to clean carpets, or how to eavesdrop?" his voice cut through the silent corridor like a razor blade. It was deep, gravelly, and laced with a bitter cynicism that stung sharper than a physical blow.
I scrambled backward, my face burning with sudden humiliation, instantly dropping into the deferential posture Grandma Carmen had drilled into me.
"I... I was just picking up the laundry basket, Mr. Cárdenas," I stammered, my voice shaking despite my best efforts to keep it steady. "I wasn't listening to anything. I'm sorry."
He didn't move. He stood there for three agonizingly long seconds, his dark, piercing eyes scanning my face, searching for a lie, a sign of panic, or the familiar flash of greed he must have seen in the eleven maids who had fled before me.
"Curiosity is a dangerous trait in this house, Elena Salgado," he said slowly, pronouncing every syllable of my name as if reading a criminal charge. "People who look where they shouldn't usually find things they wish they could unsee. Get back to work."
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He turned on his heel and walked away toward his study, the heavy double doors slamming shut behind him with a finality that echoed through the entire floor.
I stood there in the empty hallway, my chest heaving, the faint scratchy sound from behind the locked door fading back into absolute silence. Whatever secret was trapped in that room, Rodrigo Cárdenas was guarding it with his very soul. And the more he tried to bury it, the more I realized that this house wasn't just a home—it was a mausoleum.
