CHAPTER 2: THE RECORDINGS
CHAPTER 2: THE RECORDINGS
The foyer remained silent.
Marta's face had turned ghostly white.
Gabriel Laurent lowered his phone and took a slow step forward.
"No," Marta stammered. "Mr. Laurent, this isn't what it looks like."
Gabriel didn't answer.
Instead, he pressed a button on his phone.
The sound of Lena's voice echoed through the mansion.
"Please... my arm hurts."
Then Marta's cold reply followed.
"Stop crying and keep working."
Another recording played.
Then another.
Weeks.
Months.
Hundreds of moments Gabriel had never seen.
Every lie.
Every insult.
Every punishment.
Captured by the security system he had installed to protect his family.
Lena stood frozen beside the mop bucket.
She couldn't understand why her father wasn't speaking.
Then she noticed tears gathering in his eyes.
Gabriel Laurent rarely cried.
The last time anyone had seen him cry was at his wife's funeral.
Slowly, he knelt in front of his daughter.
His hands trembled as he touched the red mark around her wrist.
"Who did this?" he asked quietly.
Lena glanced toward Marta.
She didn't need to answer.
Gabriel already knew.
Security guards appeared moments later.
Marta began shouting, pleading, inventing excuses.
But nobody listened.
For the first time in months, Lena watched someone pull Marta away instead of the other way around.
As the front doors closed behind the screaming housekeeper, Gabriel turned back toward his daughter.
"I'm sorry," he whispered.
Lena looked confused.
"You didn't do anything wrong, Dad."
Those words shattered what remained of Gabriel's composure.
Because that was exactly the problem.
He had.
By not seeing.
By not noticing.
By trusting the wrong person.
And now his little girl believed his absence wasn't his fault.
That night, Gabriel sat beside Lena's bed until she fell asleep.
May you like
Then he opened his laptop.
What he found in the archived recordings would change everything.
