Chapter 5 - Hidden Eyes
By two-thirty in the morning, Maya had fallen into a deep, exhausted sleep on her bed, her belly finally full of warm broth and milk. Teresa had tucked two thick wool blankets around the little girl, kissed her bruised forehead, and quietly locked the bedroom door from the outside, just as Victoria had left it.
Now, Teresa had one final, dangerous mission to complete before Marcus arrived.
She knew how the real world worked. She had worked for high-powered, wealthy families long enough to understand that in the courts of the rich, the truth was rarely enough. Victoria came from old money; her father was a retired appellate judge, and her friends were city council members and high-powered defense attorneys.
If Marcus came home and accused Victoria based solely on the word of a Latina maid and an eight-year-old child, Victoria would hire public relations crisis managers and ruthless lawyers. She would claim Maya had an eating disorder, claim Teresa was bitter over wages, and paint herself as the tragic, misunderstood stepmother doing her best with a disturbed child.
Teresa needed undeniable, indestructible evidence.
She walked down the service corridor to the kitchen. The stainless steel pet bowl was still sitting in the recycling bin where Victoria had tossed it after dinner.
Teresa pulled a pair of yellow rubber cleaning gloves from beneath the sink. She carefully lifted the bowl out of the bin. Inside, dried crusts of white rice still clung to the stainless steel bottom, along with the distinct imprint of small, desperate fingers that had scraped the metal clean.
Teresa pulled out a clear plastic storage bag, placed the pet bowl inside, zipped it tight, and hid it inside the heavy cleaning caddy she kept locked in the utility closet.
*One.*
Now, the second piece.
Teresa made her way toward the grand home office on the second floor.
Marcus had an extensive home security server rack in his private study. While Victoria had tampered with the common-area Wi-Fi cameras, Teresa knew something that Victoria didn't: Marcus was paranoid about corporate espionage.
Two years ago, after a competitor attempted to steal proprietary logistics software, Marcus had contracted an elite private security firm from Zurich to install three discrete, hard-wired micro-cameras in the estate—cameras that did not run on the home Wi-Fi network, did not connect to the cloud, and recorded directly to a local, encrypted solid-state drive hidden inside a false electrical breaker panel behind his study’s bookshelf.
One of those micro-cameras was hidden inside the smoke detector directly above the kitchen island.
Teresa slipped into the darkened study. The heavy scent of leather-bound books, polished cedar, and Marcus’s familiar sandalwood cologne filled the air. It felt like walking into a fortress of sanity amid the madness.
She approached the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf on the north wall. She reached behind the third shelf, finding the small brass release lever Marcus had shown her during a security orientation eighteen months ago, when he had instructed her on how to reset the breakers during winter power outages.
The bookcase swung outward with a whisper of well-oiled hinges.
Behind it sat the matte-black security console. A tiny green diode blinked steadily in the dark: *REC - 1080P - 60FPS.*
Teresa’s hands were slick with cold sweat inside her rubber gloves. She pulled up the stool, tapped the keyboard, and the dual monitors flared to life, illuminating her tense face in cold blue light.
The system requested a passcode.
Teresa stared at the flashing cursor. Her heart plummeted into her stomach. A passcode. Marcus had never given her the password to the actual terminal.
"Think, Teresa. Think," she whispered frantically to herself, clutching her temples.
What would Marcus use? It wasn't his birthday. He despised birthdays. It wasn't the company founding date.
Then she remembered the day Elena passed away. Marcus had sat at this very desk, weeping over an old photo album, whispering a date over and over like a prayer. The date they had met in a tiny coffee shop in Florence during his senior year of college.
*05-18-2004.*
Teresa typed the numbers: *051804.*
She hit Enter.
*ACCESS GRANTED.*
Teresa let out a ragged breath that sounded like a sob.
She quickly navigated through the localized directory, filtering the feeds by camera location: *CAM 03 - KITCHEN OVERHEAD.*
She set the timestamp slider back seven hours, to 5:45 PM the previous afternoon.
The video feed popped up on the high-definition monitor.
The image was terrifyingly clear. High-definition color, crystalline audio captured by a directional microphone.
There on the screen was Victoria, wearing her magenta satin blouse, leaning against the counter. There was Maya, kneeling on the hard floor in tears, clutching her stomach. And there, with unbearable clarity, was Victoria picking up the pet bowl, dumping the rice from the trash into it, placing it between the dog's water mat, and saying the words that still rang in Teresa’s nightmares:
*"Then eat from there. Eat like the little bitch you are, or don't eat at all."*
Teresa watched Maya crawl forward on her hands and knees. She watched the child’s small, trembling fingers scoop the food into her mouth while Victoria laughed, took out her phone, and browsed social media.
Teresa felt a nausea so violent she had to grip the desk to keep from vomiting.
She pulled a high-capacity USB thumb drive from Marcus's desk drawer, slotted it into the terminal port, and hit *EXPORT SELECTED FOOTAGE.*
A progress bar appeared on the screen: *Transferring... 12%... 24%...*
Suddenly, the floorboard outside the study let out a sharp, unmistakable groan.
Teresa’s blood turned to liquid ice.
She froze, her eyes darting toward the half-open office door.
Down the hallway, the soft, muffled padding of bare feet approached.
Victoria was awake.
The progress bar on the screen crawled: *68%... 74%...*
Teresa frantically reached out to switch off the dual monitors, but she knew if she cut the power now, the file transfer would corrupt. The soft blue light from the screens was casting a distinct glow across the mahogany floor, clearly visible through the crack in the doorway.
"Marcus?" Victoria’s sleepy, irritable voice called out from the corridor. "Is someone in there? Teresa?"
The footsteps drew closer. Ten feet away. Eight feet away.
*91%... 98%... 100% - TRANSFER COMPLETE.*
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Teresa ripped the USB drive from the port, slapped the power button on the monitors, and dove behind the swinging bookcase just as the study door swung wide open.
***
