Chapter Two: The First Night
The bedroom they gave us was on the third floor — a grand room with high ceilings, heavy drapes, and a four-poster bed that made me feel like I was sleeping inside a painting. Damian fell asleep quickly, his breathing evening out within minutes of his head touching the pillow. I lay awake a little longer, listening to the silence of the house, which was a different kind of silence than I was used to. Thick. Old. Like the walls had been holding their breath for years.
I was nearly asleep when I heard the door.
It opened slowly, without a knock. I sat up, my heart lurching. The room was dark, but there was enough light from the hallway to see the silhouette in the doorway — slim, upright, silver hair.
Mrs. Hargrove.
She raised one finger to her lips and beckoned.
I glanced at Damian. Still sleeping. I told myself there must be some ordinary explanation — a family tradition, a welcoming ritual, something that would make sense in a moment. I slipped out of bed and followed her into the corridor.
She moved without speaking, her slippers making no sound on the marble floor. We went down a back staircase I hadn’t seen before and stopped at a door near the end of a narrow hallway. She pushed it open.
The smell hit me first — sharp, chemical, biological. A heat that had nothing to do with temperature. And then I saw the bathtub.
It was large and made of dark wood, old-fashioned, the kind you’d find in an antique shop. It was filled with water, and covering the surface of that water, in a thick, continuous layer, were red chili peppers. Hundreds of them. Whole, split, some crushed. The water itself had turned a deep, angry orange.
“What is this?” I asked, keeping my voice low.
Mrs. Hargrove folded her hands in front of her. “A necessary step,” she said. “Get in, please. Clothes on. You’ll stay for fifteen minutes.”
I stared at her. “You’re serious.”
“Completely.” Her tone was not unkind, exactly, but it carried the weight of someone who was not accustomed to being questioned. “I understand it seems strange. But this is how it is done. This is how it has always been done.”
“I don’t understand what it is.”
She looked at me with something approaching patience. “You don’t need to understand. You need to trust the family you’ve married into.”
There was a servant standing in the corner — a young woman, maybe twenty, with downcast eyes and a cloth over her arm. She didn’t look up.
Everything in me said leave. But I was in their house, two hundred miles from my parents, with no car, no plan, and a marriage less than twelve hours old. I thought of my mother’s face at the ceremony. I thought of Damian sleeping three floors above me, peacefully unaware.
I stepped into the tub.
The burning was immediate and total. It went through the fabric of my nightclothes as if they weren’t there, seizing the skin of my legs, my thighs, my stomach. I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek to stop myself from crying out. Tears came anyway — involuntary, streaming.
“Keep still,” Mrs. Hargrove said.
I kept still.
The servant added more peppers to the water. I watched her do it and said nothing.
Fifteen minutes. I counted each one.
