Only once she had watched the door close did Elena let out a breath. She had very nearly given herself away.
"Dammit... that old hag! I'll let you strut around another couple of days, hmph!"
She took one last look at the box in the corner with the poison buried in it, and then set to cleaning in earnest.
For an assassin, Elena was actually very good at household skills; disguise and infiltration were required courses in the trade, after all.
So it did not take her long to scrub the cluttered storeroom spotless, with even the junk stacked in neat rows.
"Whew... finally done..."
Elena wiped the sweat from her forehead with her arm, and a satisfied smile crossed her face despite herself as she looked at the clean storeroom.
Next was the second floor... A perfect chance to investigate what that old hag did with her days.
With that thought she left the storeroom, picked up the broom and dustpan, and headed back upstairs.
Elena went first to the room nearest the top of the stairs, turned the handle lightly, and the door opened easily.
Inside seemed to be a study. The room held only two shelves crammed with books and a desk wedged between them.
Nothing about it looked particularly special, and the floor was not especially dirty, so Elena simply pulled the door shut again.
She moved on to the second room, the one closest to Lilith's bedroom — the room that had been set aside for her.
She pushed the door open. Inside was a bedroom that was not small at all, laid out almost exactly like Lilith's.
The bed, the desk, the full-length mirror, even the wardrobe were all the same models, and all of them looked far from cheap.
It was only that no one seemed to have lived here in a long time; a layer of dust lay over the floor and the desk.
Elena gave it one quick look around and then cleaned it thoroughly, since this was where she would be living from now on and she could hardly cut corners.
That cleaning took half an hour.
When she had finished, Elena inspected it carefully, then left and headed for the last room.
The last room was Lilith's bedroom, and Lilith ought to be inside it right now.
Elena pushed the door straight open without hesitation and without knocking, as though in revenge against Lilith.
Inside, Lilith was seated at her desk, apparently sorting through documents of some kind.
Elena set the cleaning things down off to one side and then sidled over, trying to get a look at what Lilith was doing.
But she had made too much noise opening the door, and was caught at once.
"No looking~"
Lilith set down her pen and turned to face Elena, smiling.
"Tch...! Fine, don't let me look. As if I care."
"Mm-hm, good girl~ Clean nicely now~"
Lilith reached out and gave Elena's cheek a light pinch, then turned back around to go on working through the stack of documents.
"Hmph!"
Elena rubbed the pinched spot resentfully, picked the broom back up, and started sweeping again.
Except she was not being honest about it.
It was rare to get to share a room with Lilith like this, and she needed to do some proper investigating.
At the very least, to find an opening to poison her!
So as she cleaned, Elena did not forget to steal glances at Lilith, and after watching for a while she noticed a cup of black tea on the desk.
What was more, Lilith kept picking it up for small sips, as though she could not bear to finish it all at once.
An idea sprang into Elena's mind at once: Lilith clearly loved black tea, so wouldn't putting the poison in the tea do the job!
But how exactly could she do it without being caught?
Elena sank into thought again, and the sweeping in her hands came to an unconscious stop.
Slip the drug in while Lilith was away?
She dismissed the idea quickly. Setting aside whether Lilith would even give her the chance, it was far too easy to get caught that way.
Then offer to brew Lilith's tea for her?
That was no good either — too deliberate, too easy to suspect. Elena ruled that one out as well.
She turned it over for a long while and finally decided not to rush it. She would watch for a few days first and find the best moment.
And if she played the obedient maid for a couple of days, she might even get Lilith to lower her guard.
But while Elena was still deep in thought, Lilith had appeared — she had no idea when — right in front of her where she stood frozen in place.
"What's the matter? Is my little maid plotting something wicked? You've been stopped for quite a while~"
Her voice startled Elena awake. She had not noticed at all how long she had been standing there.
"I-I am not!"
Elena hastily backed up a step and turned her face away, too guilty to look at her.
"All right~ Then work nicely. I'm going to brew a cup of tea, so absolutely no snooping~"
Lilith gave Elena the warning, then smiled, picked up her teacup, and left the room.
The moment Lilith was out of the room with the door shut, Elena flung the broom aside.
"Hmph~ Tell me not to look and I'll look on purpose. Let's see what's so mysterious about it."
She went to the desk and looked over the pile of documents Lilith had just been sorting.
The result was that Elena's head started swimming after barely a moment.
The papers were almost all invoices, or various reports concerning the domain.
Elena could not make head or tail of them.
But a thick volume on the desk caught her attention, a book with nothing written on its cover at all.
The binding seemed to be made from some animal's hide, very sturdy and with a real sense of age to it.
She opened it and glanced through, and found that it appeared to be a diary.
She skipped past the earlier pages and turned straight to the most recent one, which happened to record yesterday's events.
The xxth of the xxth month, xxxx. Rain.
Caught a dumb cat today. She really is dumb — she never once noticed me watching her the whole time.
I thought I had gotten used to being alone, but after actually seeing her, I still could not resist teasing her a little.
I have no idea how an idiot like this became an assassin. Far too naive, and far too unwary.
Isn't that right? My cute little maid?
"Isn't that right? My cute little maid~?"
Elena started violently at that last line, as though the old hag had spoken it right beside her ear.
She snapped the diary shut in a panic, and at the same moment a chill came from behind her.
Realizing something was wrong, Elena slowly turned her head, and there was Lilith's face.
Elena had no idea whatsoever when Lilith had come back. And if that was the case...
Then the voice she had just heard had not been her imagination?
At the thought, she launched herself upright without meaning to and got well away from the desk.
"Y-you... when did you get back!"
Elena stared at Lilith in open alarm, even beating her to the interrogation.
"Haven't we had this exact exchange once already?"
Lilith advanced toward Elena one step at a time, slowly, but with an overwhelming weight to it.
"More to the point, though, my little maid doesn't seem very obedient. Do you remember what I said before I left~?"
For every step Lilith advanced, Elena retreated one, until her back met the wall and there was nowhere left to go.
Only then did Elena answer, guiltily.
"Ngh! N-no snooping through things..."
"Oh my, so you remember it perfectly~ Which means you did it knowing full well, doesn't it?"
As Lilith kept closing in, Elena, knowing she could not escape, suddenly turned defiant.
"But... there was nothing in it anyway. I looked, so what!"
Lilith did not answer. She simply walked up in front of Elena and looked at her trembling there.
Lilith braced one hand against the wall beside Elena's head, then pushed her right leg between Elena's, leaving her unable to move.
Then she reached out with her right hand and tilted Elena's chin up, so that Elena could look nowhere but at her.
"Pfft... Never mind, I'll stop teasing you. You're so cute like this~"
Lilith suddenly burst out laughing.
"But I've made a note of this one. Disobey me again... and there'll be a punishment~"
Lilith gave her the warning in that gentle voice again, and then let Elena go.
The reprieve drained the strength from Elena's body all at once and she sank to the floor; what Lilith had just done had set her heart racing for reasons she could not explain.
Elena was thoroughly annoyed, but she had no choice except to do as she was told.
"I... get it, all right!"
Only when she heard Elena's answer did Lilith return, satisfied, to the desk and go back to working through the documents.
There was a fresh cup of black tea on the desk now, still giving off a little steam.
"Damn woman..."
Elena muttered the curse in Lilith's direction, and then set about cleaning obediently.
But she never noticed that, in the moment she was cursing Lilith under her breath, the corners of Lilith's mouth curved slightly upward.