Chapter 1 - The Woman on Monitor Four
People thought they knew how monsters were made. They imagined blood, betrayal, and dark alleys.
Sometimes, however, a monster was simply a man sitting alone in a dark room, bathed in the blue glow of a grainy security feed.
Damian Costa had built an empire on violence and trusted no one. Then he saw her—a maid earning $12 an hour, wearing scuffed shoes, patiently spoon-feeding his dying mother after the expensive nurses had given up.
He watched in silence for 8 days.
On the 9th, everything changed.
Damian did not trust humanity. Experience had taught him that loyalty was only a question of price and love was a vulnerability enemies used to slit a man’s throat.
He ruled the city’s underworld from a sprawling, sterile estate built into the cliffs, a fortress of glass, steel, and 100 hidden cameras.
His favorite room was neither the master suite nor the boardroom.
It was a windowless bunker in the basement, lined with glowing monitors.
There, Damian played God.
He watched guards patrol the perimeter. He watched his lieutenants whisper in hallways.
Lately, he watched the east wing.
Room 104.
His mother’s room.
Beatrice Costa was 72, although Alzheimer’s disease made her look 90. The woman who had once navigated mafia politics with a shark’s smile had been reduced to a frail, angry ghost.
She threw things.
She screamed.
She spat puréed food at registered nurses who cost Damian $2,000 a day.
They treated her like a volatile bomb, approaching with clinical detachment and poorly concealed disgust.
Damian could not entirely blame them.
He hated them for it anyway.
It began on a Tuesday.
Day 1.
On monitor 4, a new figure appeared in the doorway.
She was not wearing the crisp white scrubs of the medical staff. Her uniform was shapeless and faded gray. A housekeeping cart followed behind her.
Her name was Tessa Miller.
Damian knew because he required a background file on every person who breathed the air inside his house.
Tessa was 26.
Unremarkable credit score.
2 eviction notices in the previous 4 years.
No criminal record.
Just another ghost inside the machine.
On the screen, Tessa parked her cart.
The nurse on duty had just retreated from Beatrice’s room with a red face and applesauce staining her scrub top.
Beatrice sat in the center of the bed, chest heaving, eyes wild with fear.
Damian leaned forward.
His finger hovered near the intercom button.
If the cleaner made 1 wrong move, raised her voice, or showed even a trace of disrespect, he would have her removed from the estate before she understood what had happened.
Tessa did not yell.
She did not flinch.
She crossed to the nightstand, picked up a damp cloth, and moved toward the bed.
Beatrice bared her teeth.
A feral sound scraped from her throat.
Tessa stopped beyond striking distance.
She did not speak to Beatrice as though she were a child.
She did not use the high-pitched, patronizing voice the nurses favored.
She simply stood there, shoulders sagging with the kind of bone-deep exhaustion Damian recognized immediately.
It was the posture of someone who had spent an entire life fighting gravity.
“They make this stuff taste like cardboard, don’t they?”
Tessa’s voice came through the security microphone with slight distortion, but the dry delivery remained clear.
Beatrice blinked.
The feral sound stopped.
Tessa pulled a wooden chair beside the bed, ignoring the expensive ergonomic stool the nurses used.
“I get it,” she continued, dipping a spoon into the oatmeal. “If someone tried to feed me unseasoned mush, I’d throw it at their head too. But you need to eat. If you don’t eat, they’ll put a tube in your arm, and neither of us wants to deal with that.”
She held out the spoon.
She did not push it toward Beatrice’s mouth.
She simply held it between them.
A choice.
For 3 agonizing minutes, nothing happened.
Damian watched.
His coffee grew cold.
The cigarette in the ashtray burned down to the filter.
Then Beatrice slowly leaned forward.
She opened her mouth.
She took the bite.
Damian exhaled without realizing he had been holding his breath.
Over the next 2 days, a quiet routine developed.
The medical staff, eager to avoid Beatrice’s wrath, began arranging their breaks around Tessa’s cleaning schedule.
Tessa never complained.
She finished mopping the hardwood floor, parked her cart, and picked up the bowl.
She fed the matriarch of the Costa family with the mechanical competence of a woman completely unimpressed by wealth.
She wiped Beatrice’s chin.
Brushed her thinning gray hair.
Sometimes she talked about the weather, the unreliable city bus schedule, or the increasingly ridiculous price of eggs.
Damian watched all of it.
He studied every micro-expression on Tessa’s face.
He waited for the mask to slip.
He expected her to pocket a silver picture frame, search through drawers, or angle for a tip from the nursing supervisor.
She never did.
At the end of the 3rd day, Damian switched the feed to the employee exit.
Tessa walked into driving rain.
She pulled the hood of a thin, cheap jacket over her head. Her white canvas sneakers were completely inadequate for the storm.
She disappeared across the pavement with the slow, heavy steps of someone already exhausted before the journey home began.
Damian continued staring at the empty screen after she was gone.
The silence in the bunker felt heavier than usual.
That night, Tessa stood beneath the broken awning at the employee bus stop, counting the coins left after buying a packet of bandages for the blister on her heel. The bus was twenty minutes late. She opened her phone to a photograph of her sister, Hannah, grinning beneath a paper birthday crown in a hospital room. Someone had written YOU CAN HAVE THE FIRST SLICE across the cake box. Hannah had insisted on sharing even then.
May you like
Tessa pressed her thumb against the photograph. She did not know that a camera above the gate recorded her standing in the rain, or that the man inside the mansion could have summoned a driver with a single word. She knew only that Beatrice had eaten three spoonfuls more than the day before, and had tapped a rhythm on the blanket as if remembering a song. Three taps, a pause, then two.
On the bus, Tessa wrote it in the small notebook where she tracked Beatrice's preferences: wooden chair, no television during meals, announce yourself from the doorway, ask before touching. She added a question beneath the list. Why had someone removed the family photographs from the nightstand? Then she closed the notebook. There would be time to ask tomorrow, if anybody was willing to answer.
