My Greedy Cousin Tried To Evict Me From My Own Mansion — He Didn’t Know I Had The Receipts

Part 1

For twenty-three years, my only inheritance was the stench of boiled turnips and damp wool.

I scrubbed the floors of the local orphanage for the unwanted until my knuckles cracked and bled into the caustic lye.

I never waited for a savior to arrive at the rotting edge of our city.

But then a black carriage with a crested door rolled into our muddy courtyard.

A man with tired, slate-gray eyes stepped out into the muck without a flinch.

He carried the one thing I never asked for.

He brought the truth about a father who threw me away.

The water in my bucket had gone entirely gray.

I plunged my hands into the murky soup of dirt and bristles anyway, wringing out the heavy floor rag.

The lye bit into the fresh splits along my knuckles.

I barely registered the sharp, familiar sting anymore.

By the laws of the parish, I should have been turned out onto the street seven years ago.

But the orphanage needed a drudge, and I needed a roof that didn’t leak directly onto my face.

I stayed in the shadows, becoming as unnoticed and unloved as the rising damp.

My name was Brenda.

Just Brenda.

The registry book from the night I was left on the steps had rotted away in a cellar flood twelve years back.

It took whatever surname I might have had down into the mud with it.

I pushed the rag forward in a wide arc.

My knees ached furiously against the damp, splintering wood.

The building was quiet, save for the rhythmic slosh of my scrubbing and a distant cough from the infirmary.

It was freezing.

A deep, bone-settling chill lived permanently in those stone walls.

I dragged the back of my wrist across my forehead, leaving a streak of dirty water near my hairline.

Then came the heavy, syncopated strike of iron-shod hooves echoing into the courtyard.

Premium leather springs squealed in protest against the uneven cobblestones.

Carriages like that didn’t come to our miserable corner of the world.

I wiped my hands on my coarse gray apron and stood up.

My joints popped loudly in the quiet hall.

Through the distortion of the cheap glass window, I saw the beast of a carriage gleaming beneath the heavy overcast sky.

The massive, restless gray horses snorted plumes of white vapor into the freezing air.

The tall man in the dark wool coat didn’t look around with the usual disgusted pity of the charity board members.

He adjusted his cuffs, his jaw set tight as if he were walking to an execution.

Megan, the cruel woman who ran the home, barked my name down the corridor.

She shoved me toward the parlor, demanding I look at the floor and speak only when spoken to.

She told me his name was Greg, and he was a man of extreme wealth and influence.

I opened the door and stepped inside.

Greg was standing by the unlit fireplace, smelling of rain soap and expensive leather.

His pale eyes swept over my wet apron and my cracked boots.

I didn’t see pity in his face.

I saw a tight, restrained fury that made my pulse jump in my throat.

Greg revealed he had spent the last three agonizing months looking for me.

Crossing my arms defensively over my chest, I felt hyper-aware of how thin my dress was.

This miserable place was meant for things people wanted to throw away and never look at again.

A thick envelope of heavy parchment, sealed with a cracked wax stamp, appeared in his gloved hands.

The matron had been secretly paid to keep me alive and never ask my father’s true surname.

A cold, metallic taste flooded the back of my mouth.

My father, Greg stated bluntly, was dead.

The man had been a wealthy lord, trapped in a marriage to a woman who couldn’t bear children.

My existence was the product of a quiet affair, a massive scandal he was too weak to face yet too weak to completely discard.

I waited for the grief to hit me, but I only felt a surge of violent, suffocating rage.

I asked Greg what he wanted me to do.

He told me my father left me everything that wasn’t legally tied to his distant cousin.

He had legitimized my name right before taking his last breath.

Greg offered me a townhouse, a massive fortune, and a chance to leave this hell.

I wanted to refuse the scraps of a coward who left me to freeze.

But Greg looked at my rotting hands and told me I could stay and let my spine curve, or I could take the money and make my father’s ghost pay.

Ten minutes later, I walked out the door with my only possessions tied in a faded linen bundle.

I stepped into a world of charcoal velvet and silent servants.

The massive townhouse was a pristine fortress of white stone and mahogany.

I took a scalding bath that turned the water just as gray as my scrubbing bucket.

They gave me heavy, ill-fitting silk dresses that felt like armor.

I was terrified of the soft carpets and the ticking clocks.

Then the wolves arrived at the front door.

My father’s distant cousin, Craig, marched into the drawing room with a solicitor.

He had inherited the title, but he was furious that the wealth went to a bastard daughter.

He sneered at me through a perfumed handkerchief.

Craig called me a fraud and a feral imposter dragged in from the gutters.

He told me he would take the matter to court and leave me with absolutely nothing.

He offered me a pathetic sum of coins to disappear quietly before he ruined me.

He thought I was a broken maid who would take his pennies and run, but he didn’t know what I had found in the top drawer of my father’s desk.