Chapter 1 - The Midnight Screams
Mafia Boss’s Twins Screamed in Pain—Until a Maid Tore Open Their Teddy Bear and Found the Truth
The first time the twins screamed, everyone blamed grief.
The second time, they blamed nightmares.
By the eighth week, the maid was the only person in the mansion willing to believe the monster was real.
At exactly three o’clock in the morning, the walls of the Starks estate seemed to inhale. The house sat high above the Hamptons shoreline, all pale stone and black-framed windows, with lawns clipped so cleanly they looked painted on. Beyond the glass, the ocean was a sheet of darkness, restless under a cold spring wind. Rain had come in after midnight, thin and needling, tapping against the roof tiles and whispering through the gutters like someone trying to get inside.
Veronica Cruz was awake before the screaming began.
She had been awake for most of the night, sitting on the edge of the narrow bed in her staff room with one slipper on and one slipper on the floor, her robe tied crookedly at the waist, her hands folded so tightly in her lap that her knuckles ached. The room smelled faintly of laundry starch, lemon floor polish, and the cheap peppermint tea she had made and forgotten. A small travel clock on the dresser glowed blue in the dark.
2:58.
She stared at the numbers until they blurred.
Down the hall, two six-year-old girls slept in a nursery larger than the apartment Veronica had once shared with her mother in Queens. Lily and Rose Starks, identical except for the tiny mole beneath Rose’s left eye, had once filled that wing of the house with singing, arguing, running feet, and breathless secrets. They had been girls who hid cookies in doll cradles, who braided ribbons into each other’s hair, who asked Veronica why the moon followed the car and whether ghosts needed sweaters.
Now they moved like frightened old women.
They flinched at sudden sounds. They held their heads as if listening hurt. Their faces had gone pale and fine, their lashes dark against skin that looked almost translucent in the morning light. Each night, just before dawn, Veronica stripped sheets damp with sweat from the bed and pretended not to see the small crescent marks where the girls had clawed at their own palms.
The doctors called it shared anxiety.
The psychologist called it twin escalation.
The sleep specialist called it a complex behavioral cycle.
Veronica called it suffering.
And suffering, in her experience, usually had a source.
At 2:59, the house was quiet except for the rain and the low hum of the heating system. Somewhere downstairs, a security guard coughed. A pipe ticked inside the wall. Veronica heard the far-off creak of the old nursery floorboards settling.
Then the clock changed.
3:00.
The first scream ripped through the hallway so violently that Veronica’s body moved before her mind could catch up. She was through her door, barefoot now, robe loose, heart slamming against her ribs. A second scream joined the first, the voices so perfectly matched that for one awful second they sounded like one child splitting in two.
“Daddy! Make it stop!”
“The monster is buzzing!”
Veronica ran.
May you like
Behind her, deeper in the family wing, Rory Starks’s bedroom door burst open with a crack against the wall. His footsteps came heavy and uneven, the footsteps of a man who frightened whole rooms in daylight but stumbled like any father when his children screamed in the dark.
Veronica reached the nursery first.
