The Crazy Daughter of the Duke's Family - Book One: Pandora

Chapter 1: The Lady of the Annex

A numb feeling lulled the young girl to sleep, the heavy sound of her own blood coursing through her veins echoing in her ears, like a soundtrack in the background.

There was this distant sense of agony, but it was cushioned by a muddy feeling of slowly sinking into the deep. As if Celia had stepped into a lake made of quicksand.

A sudden pain in her chest shook her entire torso as her heart began to pound like a sledgehammer inside. Shocked, her eyes popped open, only to close again as she began to flail her arms in the water around her.

Her throat burned and the urge to gag overwhelmed her, only allowing more fluid to enter her respiratory system. It was surprisingly easy to get to the surface, holding on to anything she could find and spitting out all the water she had inhaled. It took several minutes of coughing and heaving as she hung on, shaking like a leaf in the wind.

Celia didn't know how she had gotten to this point, or why she hadn't died as she had assumed, but she knew she had to get out of there as soon as possible.

She clung desperately to the wall of the strange container she woke up in, as her heavy clothing pulled her back into the water. It was a terrifying struggle until she managed to swing one leg over what seemed to be the edge of a steep tub.

When she finally rolled over the highest point, she was slammed onto the hard ground by sheer power of gravity. The pain traveled through her instantly, sitting nicely next to her aching lungs and the pounding in her head, as she pulled her face up that was stuck flat to the ground.

Her body felt uncomfortable and she was confused as well. There was a ball of sharp pain stuck in her chest, rippling through her in waves as regular as clockwork. There was wet hair stuck to her cheek and forehead, but even though her vision wasn't impaired, she couldn't easily believe that what she was seeing was real.

It was hard to understand what she was looking at. And it was not just because her brain had been rattled a bit when she had hit the floor.

'This feels like a fever dream.' She was looking at a brass bathtub straight out of a museum. 'How does this thing look so posh? Did I wake up in some millionaire's mansion?'

On four intricately carved lion paws, it stood proudly in the middle of a huge washroom. She had never seen a bathroom this big in her life, not even the shared ones in the dorms could compare.

One side of the room was covered with large windows, with a screen behind the bathtub being the only thing that protected privacy in there.

On top of that, the beautiful view of a setting sun, offered by those large windows, was as unfamiliar to her as the room itself. "Pan?" Her restless eyes searched the room for someone invisible as she croaked out his name. "Pan!"

He did not respond. Something she had feared since the moment she had gained some clarity in her mind. It frightened her - to be alone. She had never been on her own for as long as she could remember. This was unprecedented.

Powerless, Celia tried to drag her soaked and numb limbs across the white-tiled floor. At that moment, she looked down at her hands, feeling fragile as they shook meagerly under the pressure of her wet weight.

Her nails were clean and well manicured. And had her arms always been like this? As she continued to examine her hands, she couldn't find any of her callouses.

She might not have added any after she learned how to do her craft properly, but she surely had them from the time before she gained that knowledge. She should have scars on her arms as well, but she saw nothing but pearly skin - if anything, the only flaw in her skin was the slightly grayish tint.