Everyone Laughed When He Paid $3.2 Million for a Cursed Manor — His Silent Dog Already Knew What Was Sealed Inside

Chapter 4

The woman who met the six candidates on the porch wore a grey apron without a single wrinkle and her hair in a low bun. She did not shake anyone’s hand. She counted heads, exactly six, and spoke in the voice of someone who had repeated the same words so many times she no longer heard them herself.

“Before you enter, three rules. I’ll say them once. First — if he speaks to you, don’t look him in the eyes. Second — don’t ask questions. About the house, about the work, about the people who come here, or about the people who used to work here. If you don’t understand an instruction, you say, I don’t understand. But you don’t ask.” She paused. A seabreeze moved across the porch and her apron stirred faintly. “Third.” Her voice changed only slightly, but enough to make all six women look up at once. “There is a dog in the house. His name is Titus. You don’t touch him. You don’t reach toward him. You don’t call him. You don’t stare at him too long. He has put two grown men in the hospital, and both of them thought they were good with dogs.”

A blonde girl at the end of the line laughed — one small sound, silenced the instant Ivy Ferris turned her head.

“The third rule is the only rule that won’t come with a second conversation,” Ivy said. “Go inside.”

The main hall was colder than the porch. The ceiling rose thirty-three feet overhead. White marble had aged to ivory, and three-quarters of the way down the west corridor, directly in the middle of the passage, a dog lay on the floor. He rested on his side, head across his paws, and his body filled almost the entire width of the corridor. One hundred fifty pounds of black Neapolitan mastiff, fur the color of water at the bottom of a well, loose skin hanging in folds around his jaws, eyes half-open, wet, unblinking. He didn’t lift his head when they entered.

Ivy went first, hugging the wall. The five women followed one by one, circling wide, eyes fixed straight ahead. One held her breath. Clara was last. She took three steps and stopped.

She didn’t know why she stopped. The dog still hadn’t raised his head, but his eyes had shifted, and now he was watching her.

She stood a long moment, looking down at him, and she saw what the other five had missed because they had been too busy walking around him. He wasn’t guarding the hall. He wasn’t tense. His shoulders sagged. His hind legs were stretched out. One side of his body rested against the floor in the posture of a creature that had lain in that exact spot many times before. He wasn’t blocking anything. He was simply there, and he was tired.

Clara set her handbag on the floor. Then she knelt, about six feet away, both knees against the cold stone. She didn’t reach out. She didn’t call him. She didn’t look into his eyes. She only lowered herself to his level, placed both hands on her thighs, palms open, and waited.

“Miss Whitmore,” Ivy said, and her crisp voice was no longer crisp.

Ten seconds. Twenty. Outside, the wind struck the windows, and there was no other sound anywhere in that house with twenty-two rooms.

Then the dog lifted his head. He rose slowly, one joint at a time, the way a hundred-and-fifty-pound animal has to rise — and the blonde girl at the end of the corridor stepped backward. He came toward Clara. Four steps. No growl. No lowered head. He stopped directly in front of her, and then his twenty-six-pound head sank into her lap, and he released one long, shuddering breath.

Clara didn’t move. She let him stay there. Then, very slowly, she placed one hand on the back of his neck.

From the staircase above, a voice came down. Not loud. Nothing in it at all.

“She’s hired.”

Six heads lifted. Elias Croft stood on the second-floor landing, one hand on the banister, and no one had seen him arrive. He said nothing more. He turned and disappeared.

Ivy Ferris stood frozen at the end of the corridor. She wasn’t looking at Nathan— at the landing. She wasn’t looking at the dog. She was looking at Clara’s two hands, and for nearly two seconds, the face of the woman who had recited three rules in the voice of a machine suddenly failed to hide something. Then she blinked, and it was gone.