"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions."
***
The laundry room sat in the guts of the Leone estate where nobody ever went after dark. The walls were old stone that sweated moisture year-round, and the whole place smelled like soap and mildew had been at war for decades with no clear winner.
It was perfect.
Lyra's knees hurt against the cold floor. She didn't care. Pain meant she was alive. Pain meant she was here, in this moment, about to do something that mattered.
She spread a white cloth across the stones with both hands. The silk had come from Lady Vivienne's personal collection. Lyra had swiped it during the afternoon's party when everyone was too busy gossiping to notice a servant with quick fingers. The fabric was worth three months of her wages.
Nothing less would do. Not for this.
The letter sat in the center of her little altar.
She didn't touch it right away. That would be too easy. Too fast. She wanted to savor this.
Her tools lay arranged around the parchment. A paring knife she'd borrowed from the kitchen after everyone went to bed. A clay cup of hot water, still steaming in the cold air. A candle stub she'd rescued from his study, the wax still carrying traces of his lamp oil.
His things. His scent. His trust.
The red seal caught the candlelight. An ouroboros. A snake swallowing its own tail. House Argent's mark, pressed deep into the wax.
He could have hired someone for this. The thought kept circling back. A professional. A guildsman with actual training and credentials. Someone who knew what they were doing.
But he picked her.
The broken thing from the gallows. The girl who'd spent years collecting table scraps and sleeping in storage closets. The nobody.
He'd looked at her and seen something worth saving.
Lyra's hand reached toward the letter. Her fingers stopped just short of the parchment, hovering there, trembling. She wasn't afraid. Fear had burned out of her years ago, leaving nothing but ash and survival instincts.
This was something else entirely.
Her chest felt tight. Her breath came shallow. If she'd had to put a name to the feeling, she might have called it worship.
A draft slipped under the door. The candle flickered hard, almost died. Cold air touched her throat where her collar hung loose.
And suddenly she wasn't in the laundry room anymore.
Cobblestones against her cheek. The texture scraped her skin raw. She could smell rotting vegetables. Human waste. Her stomach was eating itself, had been eating itself for days, and the hunger had stopped being painful somewhere around the third afternoon without food. Now it just whispered quiet promises about how easy it would be to let go.
People walked past her. Nobles in fine clothes. Merchants with fat purses. They stepped around her body like she was trash that hadn't been collected yet. None of them looked down. None of them saw her.
She was nothing. Less than nothing. A piece of garbage waiting to be swept away.
Her breath caught. The memory had its claws in deep.
But then, warmth.
The laundry room snapped back into focus. Lyra gasped and pulled her hands toward the candle flame, close enough to feel the heat without burning.
His fingers in her hair. The weight of his approval. His voice, low and serious, calling her work excellent.
That word. Excellent. Nobody had ever used that word about anything she'd done. Nobody had ever used any word about her that wasn't an order or an insult.
The warmth spread through her chest and pushed the phantom cold back into whatever hole it had crawled out of. This feeling wasn't like fire. Fire was just heat. This was something that had a shape. A meaning.
Recognition. Purpose. A reason to keep breathing.
She thought about all the people who had looked through her over the years. The nobles who treated servants like furniture that occasionally needed instructions. The senior maids who saw her as competition for scraps. The merchants who counted coins while street children died in gutters ten feet away.
None of them had seen her. Not once. Not ever.
But he did.
He looked at her and saw someone worth teaching. Someone worth trusting with secrets that could burn his whole house down. Someone who mattered.
Lyra's hands were steady now. She reached for the letter again, and this time she didn't hesitate.
The steam did its work on the wax. Lyra watched the edges go soft, the hard surface turning pliable under the heat. Her whole world shrank down to this one tiny point where warmth met barrier.
The knife moved. One small cut along the seal's edge. You'd never notice unless you knew where to look.
The wax gave way. It parted without breaking, without leaving marks. Clean.
She worked the letter open and let her mind wander to whoever had written this thing.
Some faceless schemer out there thought they were clever. They sat in their comfortable study, probably sipping wine, whispering poison into Lord Lucius's ear. They looked at House Leone and saw easy pickings. They watched her Master stumble around like a fool and laughed behind their hands.
They had no idea.
Lyra's face stayed calm in the candlelight. Peaceful, even. She wore the same expression she used when she was mending clothes or polishing silverware. Just another task. Just another mess that needed cleaning.
When her Master gave the word, she would handle this problem the same way she handled everything else. Carefully. Thoroughly. She would take this clever schemer apart piece by piece until there was nothing left but a cautionary tale.
An insect in the Master's study. A smudge on something clean. A stain that needed scrubbing out.
She'd wait for his signal. A look. A word. Even a small gesture would be enough. And then?
Then she'd get to work.
The seal came away from the parchment without resistance. Lyra unfolded the letter slowly, treating it like something holy, and read by candlelight. Every word went into her memory. Every phrase. Every hint buried between the lines.
The contents matched what her Master had predicted. Flowery promises of support for Lucius's ambitions. Veiled hints about alliances with families known for their cruelty. The kind of rot that grew inside noble houses until the whole structure collapsed.
But there, at the bottom, hidden in the pleasantries: a name.
A signature written in confident strokes. The snake had signed its own death warrant.
Lyra felt nothing at the discovery. No triumph. No pride. Just a quiet readiness, like a blade sitting in its sheath, waiting for someone to draw it.
This information was a gift. Something to lay at his feet. Proof that he hadn't wasted his faith on a worthless servant girl who should have died in a gutter months ago.
Putting the seal back took longer than opening it. She warmed the wax with careful adjustments to the steam, pressed it into place with the flat of her knife, smoothed it until the letter looked untouched. Like nobody had ever read it.
Perfect.
She blew out the candle. The laundry room went black. The smell of the dead flame hung in the air like incense at a shrine.
In the darkness, Lyra pressed the letter against her chest. She could feel her heart beating against the parchment. Fast. Excited.
Tomorrow morning, she would go back to his chambers. She would kneel in front of him, right where she belonged, and hand over everything she'd learned. Like a cat dropping a dead mouse at its owner's feet. Look what I caught. Look what I can do. Please tell me I did good.
And maybe, if she was lucky, he would touch her hair again.
Maybe he would call her excellent.
Maybe he would give her something else to do. Another chance to prove that saving her hadn't been a mistake.
Lyra stood up from the cold floor. Her knees ached from kneeling so long. She ignored it. Pain was just information, and this particular information wasn't important.
She folded the silk cloth. Put away the knife. Returned the cup to where it belonged. Every trace of what she'd done here got erased like she was cleaning up after a crime scene.
The only evidence left was the letter itself. And that belonged to her Master now.
Her room was barely bigger than a closet. A narrow bed. A single shelf. Four walls that felt more like a coffin than a home. She'd lived in worse. At least this coffin had a door she could close.
Lyra tucked the letter under her mattress and lay down on top of the covers without bothering to undress. Sleep wasn't coming tonight. She was too wired, too full of nervous energy, too aware of the precious information pressing against her back through the thin padding.
But she could wait. Waiting was something she'd mastered years ago. She'd spent so long in the margins of this estate, learning patience the way other people learned to breathe. The shadows had taught her how to be still. How to endure. How to watch without being seen.
The difference now was that the waiting meant something.
Before, she'd waited for scraps. For orders. For the day when her body finally gave out and she could stop pretending any of it mattered.
Now she waited for him.
She closed her eyes. The cold room faded away. The hard mattress stopped existing. Her body became irrelevant, just a container for the purpose burning inside her chest.
His voice echoed in her head. That moment when he'd looked at her work and judged it worthy. One word, playing on repeat like a song she couldn't get out of her brain.
Excellent.
Excellent.
Excellent.