Chapter Three: Paper Walls, Wooden Secrets

The Kurokami estate was made of paper, wood, and whispers.

Sound traveled strangely through it. A conversation in the front corridor could echo faintly through the tea house two rooms away. Footsteps on polished floors became drumbeats in quiet hours. Doors slid without a sound, but eyes—eyes were always watching.

Melissa learned this quickly.

She also learned that no one spoke of the west wing.

It loomed on the far side of the estate, set apart by a long hallway that bent sharply like a sword's curve. There were no lamps along its path. No maids were assigned to clean it. And yet, it remained free of dust.

One morning, while carrying tea to the council chamber, she paused at the turn.

The corridor yawned before her, dark and too quiet. The wooden floorboards there gleamed faintly in the morning light, but something about the air was wrong—heavy, still, like the breath of something waiting.

A soft shuffle echoed from deep inside the corridor.

Melissa turned and walked away. Slowly. Never running. But walking faster than her normal walking.

---

By week’s end, she’d found her rhythm.

She rose before the sun, cleaned the outer stones, prepared tea and rice for the lower lords. She was neither praised nor scolded, and that suited her. Eyes off her meant safety.

But Lord Kaito disrupted everything.

She passed him more frequently now. At odd hours. In places she hadn’t expected: the narrow library alcove, the inner garden bridge, the hallway near the shrine. Always alone. Always quiet. As if he, too, avoided being seen.

He never addressed her.

But each time, he hesitated—just slightly—as though something should have been said. As though he knew her name, and was swallowing it like something dangerous.

Melissa began to feel it—the shift. The heat beneath stillness. A gaze held just a moment longer than courtesy allowed.

Once, as she carried a tray past the camellia hall, she paused at a half-open screen door. Inside, Lord Kaito was seated alone at the low writing desk, ink brush in hand. He wasn’t writing. He was staring at the parchment, unmoving.

Then, softly, he said, “Melissa.”

She stiffened.

Her name—spoken so quietly, and not meant to be heard.

She backed away before he could turn.

---

That night, the wind howled through the beams. Melissa sat in the servants’ quarters, warming her fingers over a coal brazier. The other maids laughed softly among themselves, trading stories about the upcoming wedding, their voices feather-light and oblivious.

Melissa said nothing. Because no one will understand what's really not spoken and that's not really a truth.

She stared at the wall, and the faint outline of a camellia petal where someone had once leaned too hard and stained the paper screen.

Paper walls remember everything, she thought.

And sometimes, they whisper it back.

Because by the end of the day mutter of this echo through the walls of the households.

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