Chapter Text
Vera Nair was not a coward.
She was not afraid when she was five, and her parents had walked away without her, left her stranded in the little town’s square; she was not afraid when she lost them for the second time, when they turned away from her and her dreams of making business for her talents in perfume. She wasn’t scared when she saw her sister’s success, nor when she drove a dagger deep into her heart. She wasn’t a little frightened, not even when she found out her “betrayal” was not a betrayal at all— Chloe Vera Nair was a lot of things, but a coward she was not. However, she found it reasonable to feel at least an unabiding sense of unease as the car she’d hired crawled closer to her unfortunate destination.
It was just worry. It was fine to be worried about things— if anything, she’d be a fool not to about this, right? She was just a little anxious... okay, maybe she was panicking. It’s all fine. She was not a coward and never would be. She wasn’t scared.
She was terrified.
She wrung her hands, jumping as the wheels ran over a bump in the deserted road. She had to go. She couldn’t chicken out now. Vera was not a coward. She never was, so she couldn’t be. Of course, that would just be out of character.
But she was undoubtably afraid.
What scared her most wasn’t the prospect of the hunt, nor the mystery surrounding the manor itself. It wasn’t that she knew little to nothing of what lay ahead of her. No, her fears were rooted in something much simpler: the name scrawled across the top of the invitation letter.
Dear Ms. Chloe Nair...
Oh god, what was she going to do? How did they find out? What if they told the public? She surely couldn’t show up now, could she? Then they’d all know. But... she needed that recipe more than anything... how could they even have found out? Was it a family friend?— Member, even? They’d promised her the recipe if only she could retrieve it in their “treasure hunt,” but who knows what that meant? Who was this host, and how did they know that she wasn’t really—
No. She was Vera. She’d been Vera ever since that night. There was no facade to be broken. Chloe Nair had simply ceased to exist. Good riddance, in her opinion. She was a horrible sister.
Adjusting her veil, she watched the gates come into view: surely she was meant to be here. The recipe was all she’d been searching for, with a simple trip to an abandoned manor attached. She had no choice but to go to the source of the formula and find a way to improve it. And yet, she still found fear settling within her traitorous heart.
No. Chloe had been a coward. Chloe would’ve given up and gone back to hide away in her laboratory instead of facing this challenge. But she was not Chloe. Her name was Vera Nair, and no matter what the host and this mysterious manor threw at her, she was going to get that recipe and forget Chloe’s existence forever.
Or at least, that was the plan.