Chapter 4: Missing Footage
The glow of the laptop screen illuminated the dark interior of our temporary bedroom like a miniature operating theater. It was well past midnight again, but neither of us could sleep. Ethan sat cross-legged on the edge of the mattress, his fingers flying across the keyboard with intense, mechanical focus. I sat beside him, wrapped in a heavy wool blanket, watching the progress bar crawl across the screen as the new, independent security camera system finished its first twenty-four-hour backup cycle.
"The firmware bypass worked," Ethan murmured, his voice low and taut. "Mother’s IT contractor had a back-door routing protocol installed on the main server that mirrored every single smart device in the house back to her private terminal in the east wing. But I've severed the relay. She’s completely blind to our hallway now."
"Are you sure?" I asked, my voice barely audible over the hum of the laptop fan. "She always seems to know everything we do before we even do it."
"She won't know this," Ethan said firmly, clicking open a folder labeled Hallway_Backup_04. "Now let's check the access logs from this afternoon while we were down in the garden."
He clicked on the file, bringing up a time-stamped video feed of the hallway outside our door. The corridor was quiet, bathed in the soft amber glow of the wall sconces. For the first few minutes, nothing happened. Then, at precisely 2:14 PM, the frame flickered.
Ethan frowned, leaning closer to the screen. "Wait. Did you see that?"
"Rewind it," I whispered.
He dragged the timeline back ten seconds and hit play at half-speed. The video showed the heavy oak door of the linen closet directly across from our room swinging open. A figure stepped out into the hallway—not Eleanor, but Marcus, the estate's longtime head housekeeper and general factotum. Marcus looked around cautiously, checking both ends of the corridor with practiced stealth. In his hands, he carried a heavy, black Pelican equipment case—the exact kind used to store professional networking hardware and surveillance gear.
Marcus walked directly to the smart-home junction box embedded in the wall beside our nursery door. With quick, practiced movements, he pulled a small USB drive from his pocket, plugged it into the service port of the master hub, and stood there for nearly two minutes while a series of rapid green lights flashed on the console.
"He's downloading our local camera logs," Ethan said, his voice dropping an octave into a cold, flat register that terrified me more than his shouting had. "He's pulling every clip our new camera recorded since installation."
"He's working for her," I realized aloud, the pieces clicking together with sickening clarity. "She didn't just lock us out digitally; she's using the household staff as domestic operatives to steal our data."
Ethan didn't reply immediately. He closed the video file, opened a system diagnostic report, and began scrolling through the server's root directory. "Look at this file path, Clara. This isn't just about the nursery cameras. Marcus accessed the main estate archives—the digital partition where my father's original prenuptial and trust documents were scanned back in 2010."
My breath hitched. "Your father's estate trust? Why would she want those?"
"Because those documents define the legal boundaries of the family holdings," Ethan said, his jaw working as he clenched his teeth. "And if Marcus just copied them to an external drive, it means Mother is preparing a legal strike against us before we can even consult an independent attorney."
Ethan slammed the laptop lid shut with a dull thud that echoed in the quiet room. He stood up, running a hand through his dark hair, his face twisted in a mask of grim realization. The illusion of family loyalty was entirely dead. The woman who had raised him wasn't just a controlling matriarch; she was systematically sabotaging our legal footing from the inside out, using her own payroll to spy on her son.
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"Where are you going?" I asked, grabbing the edge of the blanket as he walked toward the door.
"To find Marcus," Ethan said without looking back, his hand closing firmly around the brass doorknob. "It's time we found out who is really running this house."
