The annex at the Belunita estate does not smell like a noble's home. It smells of stale sheets, cordite, and a temper that has driven away every servant who ever crossed the threshold. Paula knows the score before she sets foot inside — her father sold her to this household the way he sold her sisters, and peasant girls do not get the luxury of refusing a posting. But what she expects is a tyrant. What she finds is Vincent Belunita, a young count who lost his eyesight to something no one will discuss, now aiming a pistol in the direction of her voice and demanding she leave before she witnesses the shell he has become.

He fires. She does not flinch. The muzzle brushed her forehead, and she told him to shoot because dying at his hand was better than watching a man crumble under silk sheets he cannot see. That moment — absurd, furious, thick with the gunpowder neither of them will ever forget — becomes the crooked foundation of a bond the household cannot learn about. Paula is his maid, yes, but she is also the only person alive allowed to yell at him until he eats, the only one who treats his blindness as an inconvenience rather than a tragedy, and therefore the most dangerous secret inside Belunita's walls. As the truth behind his accident festers closer to the surface and the viscount's son Lucas begins circling with his own hidden guilt, Paula must hold a crumbling man upright long enough for him to remember how to stand — without anyone realizing that the servant has quietly become absolutely irreplaceable.

Also known as: 백작가의 비밀스런 시녀님, Baekjakgaui Bimilseureon Sinyeonim.