The Widow's Fate They Chose Was My Escape Plan novel · Chapter 10 of 24
Chapter 10: The Servants' Stair
Willa's POV
The east wing door did not open from the inside, and Rory tried it for a long time anyway.
He put his shoulder to it once.
Nothing moved.
"Heavy oak, a steel bolt and three screws in the frame," he said. "I could be at this until Christmas."
"Then we don't use the door."
He turned and looked at me.
His hair was a mess from my hands, and I had to look somewhere else.
"There's a servants' stair," he said slowly. "Behind the closet in my mother's room. I found it when I was nine and she made me promise to forget it."
"Did you?"
"I forgot it for twenty-two years."
We went back into his mother's room, and I pulled the cardigan off the chair and put it over my arm.
Rory pushed the hanging dresses aside.
The wall behind them had a narrow door painted the same color as the plaster.
It opened onto bare steps going down into the dark.
"Stay close," he said.
I took his hand.
It was a simple thing, and neither of us said a word about the terms.
The stair ended in a corridor smelling of damp stone, with a bare bulb at the far end.
The kitchen was above us, because I could hear a mixer running and a woman singing over it.
The corridor ran straight to a plain wooden door with a padlock hanging open on the hasp.
Rory put his ear against it.
"Someone's in there."
"A guard?"
"A guard would be awake."
He eased it open.
A narrow room lay beyond, with a cot and a folding chair.
On the chair sat a man in a Keane security jacket, asleep with his chin on his chest and a thermos on the floor beside him.
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