Honestly? It’s starting to feel intentional.
The staff is lovely and the estate is gorgeous and Ambrose is charming, generous, and everything a doting father should be, but a pretty cage is still a cage. Even if the bars are invisible—made up of smiles and gifts and carefully worded requests—they still exist.
I feel them close in a little more each time I reach for a door and find someone already opening it for me. Or when I mention leaving to explore the scenery or shop in a nearby town and feel the room temp drop by ten degrees in ten seconds.
It wouldn’t be as frustrating if the staff’s cleaning schedule didn’t seem to correspond perfectly with Ambrose's early afternoon meetings. It makes sense they'd want to clean that space when he isn't home, but it makes it a lot fucking harder for me to do what I need to do.
I tuck the USB stick in my back pocket and consider the pedestal sink in my en suite bathroom, latent energy making my fingers tingle.
I need to make some sort of distraction. Something that would require Ambrose's head of staff and all of his cleaning ladies to be busy for at least twenty minutes, longer if I can swing it. If he has any sort of physical filing system, Atticus said I should try to look there for anything he might keep off digital record.
Bending to my knees on the tile, I look for the pipes or whatever, trying to see if there's something I can detach or break to make a flood in my bathroom look accidental. There's nothing here, though. All the plumbing seems to be in the wall.
I lean on the top of the sink bowl, pushing down with all my weight to see if it will tear from the wall, but it's solid as hell and doesn't budge.
"Fuck."
Toilet then.
It's nothing more than a bowl attached to the wall with the flush buttons embedded in the tile. So no toilet guts I can fuck with, which leaves…clogging?
It'll have to do.
I look around for something to use, but it needs to look accidental. Rushing back to my room, I search through clothes Ambrose's staff neatly folded and hung for me from the case Linette packed and find the toiletry bag.
I've brought what I needed into the bathroom already, but I know I saw?—
There they are.
I grab a handful of the tampons from the box, and within five minutes, I have them all unwrapped and rapidly absorbing water in the toilet bowl. I add a healthy amount of toilet paper for good measure and one of those thicker paper cloths by the sink that I've been using to dry my face.
Holding my breath, I hit the flush button, and wait as the drain tries to pull the mess down.
It gurgles and then stops, but doesn't overflow.
"Shit."
I do it again, but the water only trickles into the bowl.
"Come on."
When I press the button a third time, I hold it down until the water comes, filling the bowl and trying—but failing—to flush down the tampons and paper. I keep holding as the bowl fills and don't let go until the mess has been pulled into the pipe, and I'm absolutely sure it's clogged as fuck.
When I let go of the button, the toilet continues to fill, and I step out of the way as the water spills over the edge of the bowl and starts to spread out on the tile.
My blood sings with success and anticipation as I jump out of the path of the water and into the bedroom, racing to the phone.
I lift the receiver, but push the button to page Santiago. Not yet. Instead, I wait.
I wait until the water has come over the threshold of the bathroom, and then I wait even longer, until it starts to spread a wide circle over the bedroom floor. I don't call for help until it's soaked through the rug in the middle of the floor.
"Oh my god, hi," I blurt when Santiago answers. "Uh, the toilet in my en suite is flooding, and I don't know what to do. It won't stop. Should I?—"
"I'll be right there, miss."
The line goes dead, and I grin, waiting in my mess until I hear the thunder of several people coming up the stairs. Only then do I go and meet them in the hall and make an absolute spectacle of being embarrassed. "I don't know what happened, it just started?—"
"That's okay, miss," Santiago says, and then freezes when he gets to the doorway of my room and sees the puddle quickly turning to a lake on my bedroom floor. A lake with bits of paper and a floating tampon or two.
