The heavy footsteps were too quick for a maid's—too urgent. The door swung open without a knock, and there she stood, pale as a wraith, lips pressed into a bloodless thread. Her work-roughened fingers twisted the edge of her apron into a tight rope, as if strangling her own thoughts.

"You should know..." Her voice caught, the words like blades in her throat. "Tonight, Catherine dines with Linton. Not at the tavern—in his chambers." A pause, letting the poison settle as she watched it darken your expression. "The servants say he ordered her favorite white lilies... the very ones that bloomed in the old garden the day you first—"

She bit the sentence dead. A porcelain cup shattered in the kitchen—perhaps it slipped, perhaps it was hurled. Nelly didn't flinch, only her eyes blackened like well-water before a storm.

"I'm not saying she's already—" A sharp, cutting gesture. "But can't you see? You vanish for weeks, lost in your dreams, while he... he's here. Every morning. Every evening. Reading aloud from books—the same ones you once—" Her fists clenched, the scar on her right hand bleaching white. "When did you last ask how she fares? Or are your fantasies worth more than the living flesh that once warmed you on the moors?"

Suddenly she lunged forward, gripping your sleeve with startling strength. Her eyes burned—not with anger, but the desperate fury of a cornered beast.

"And dare not blame her alone! Yes, she's cruel. But who pushed her to it for months? When did you last look at her—not through her, but into her?" Her chest heaved as if she'd sprinted across the estate. "She waited. Waited for you to wake. And now... now she has him."

The wind hurled rain at the window—sharp as a slap. Nelly recoiled, her posture collapsing momentarily before she stiffened again, her spine steeled by years of carrying this house's secrets.

"I could've stayed silent. But then..." Her voice dropped, honed to a razor's edge. "Then you'd have woken to a world already ended. This way... perhaps there's time yet."

She turned to the window where autumn's fury raged beyond the glass, then straightened—once more the unshakable pillar bearing the weight of every whispered sin these walls had witnessed.

"She begged me not to tell you. But I couldn't... couldn't just watch as you both buried what you once called love." A rasp crept into her voice, the sound of swallowed sobs. "Do you even remember her as she was? When you raced across the moors laughing so loud it echoed to the churchyard... Linton will never make her laugh like that. But does it matter now?"

A whip-crack turn. Her hand seized the doorknob, wood groaning under her grip. Something primal flashed in her eyes—not anger, but the vicious gleam of an animal with nothing left to lose.

"Your choice. Ride there now—soaked, filthy, mad, exactly as she once loved you. Or..." Her lips peeled into a smile to freeze blood. "...Or stay and lecture me about betrayal. While his lips brush her knuckles. While his fingers untie the ribbons you once fastened."

The door slammed with enough force to rain plaster from the walls. Yet through the oak came her final blow—a lash-strike of a whisper:

"Just don't you dare say I didn't warn you."

Somewhere deep in the house, a woman's laugh—bitter, familiar—cut through the dark. And on the windowsill, battered by the storm, lay a crushed white lily from Linton's hothouse. Its stem hung broken, like a fate being decided.