Chapter Five: A Name Not of This Land

“Melissa.”

The word never sat right in the mouths of the other servants. Like a stained with poison to their own lips.

They said it like a loose thread. Like something caught in the teeth of the language they knew.

The syllables did not bow. They did not follow the curve of the words spoken in this place.

So they called her Meri-san.

When they needed her.

When they didn’t, she was the foreign maid.

The quiet one.

That girl from the war-torn province.

Melissa never corrected them. Names, after all, were only as powerful as the memories they carried—and hers carried too many.

She had been sixteen when her country broke Into a fire suddenly lit. A horse stomping on the ground and people who tugging others. The other people die by the fire or by the people who ended their own life.

Her father was a scholar, quiet and cautious, caught in the currents of a rebellion he never joined. Her mother died the year before the invasion. One by disease. One by fire. That was how the stories split.

Siblings? No she doesn't have anything. She's only a child of her parents.

Melissa remembered it too well. One of the individual who cause the fire who sells her. Binding her to a family she didn't even know.

She had arrived at the Kurokami estate under a contract signed by distant hands. Payment for loyalty. Compensation for damage. A token of peace. A symbol. A ghost.

It didn’t matter.

She was fed. She was clothed. She was not beaten. That, in this land, was considered mercy.

Still, her name whispered strange things into the rooms she entered. Like a mantra that didn't vanished.

Lord Kaito had not said it again. Not since the garden.

But he looked at her differently now.

Not with longing—not yet.

But with recognition.

That evening, the senior housekeeper summoned her.

Melissa bowed low, her sleeves dusted with ash from the lanterns she had just lit.

The housekeeper’s mouth was thin. “You have been noticed.”

Melissa said nothing. The trap was too easy.

“You do not speak out of turn. You do not cause delay. But the Lord’s eye lingers, and others have begun to watch.”