Chapter 2 - The Rules of the House
The young woman interpreted his stunned silence entirely differently. Panic flared in her red-rimmed eyes, replacing the exhaustion. She jerked her hands away from his grip as if she had been burned, quickly hiding them behind her back like a child caught stealing. She tried to scramble backward, rising so fast from the concrete that her boots slipped on a damp patch near the drain. She caught herself against the laundry sink, her breath coming in shallow, frantic gasps.
She began apologizing. A torrent of rushed, desperate syllables tumbling over one another.
She said she had finished cleaning the second-floor gallery at 9:00 p.m., that she had only returned to the basement to collect her personal laundry bag before her shift ended, and that she would leave the estate immediately. She babbled that she needed this job, repeating the plea in three different ways without ever once daring to look directly into his terrifying green eyes.
Camilo listened in absolute stillness to an injured, broken woman begging for her livelihood inside the very house where he commanded absolute obedience.
“Sit down,” he ordered.
She obeyed instantly.
She perched gingerly on the very edge of the final concrete stair, both hands jammed deep into the pockets of her apron with her fingers pressed tightly against her thighs, her shoulders drawn inward as if she were trying to physically shrink her body until she took up as little space in his world as possible.
Camilo remained standing over her, his tall frame blocking the doorway. He asked how long she had been employed at the estate.
“Fourteen months, sir,” she answered, her voice trembling. “Since September of last year.”
Fourteen months.
She had been living and working in his home through two brutal Chicago winters. She had been here while caterers prepared banquets in the grand dining room, while politicians and syndicate bosses moved in and out of his study, while mornings broke with Camilo walking down the mahogany-lined upstairs corridor while someone quietly cleaned up behind him.
He asked her name.
At that exact moment, the heavy basement heater kicked on with a loud, industrial roar, drowning out her quiet reply. He hadn't heard a syllable.
Camilo asked again, his tone sharpening.
“Joanna,” she whispered. “Joanna Callahan.”
Camilo repeated it silently on his tongue. Joanna.
Then he asked the question that had been burning a hole in his chest: Why had he never seen her? Why was this the first time she had ever registered in his field of vision?
The question sounded harsher, more accusatory than he had intended, but Joanna misunderstood it in another direction entirely. She believed he was interrogating her about whether she had violated household protocol.
She hadn't. Not once.
On her very first day on the estate, the head housekeeper, Marta Beckwith, had meticulously laid out the unwritten laws of the Marquetti household. Staff were strictly forbidden from using the main corridors or the grand hall when the master of the house was present. If Camilo entered a room, household employees were expected to immediately make themselves scarce, ducking into service pantries or retreating downstairs. They did not speak unless spoken to first. They did not make eye contact. They were ghosts required to keep the castle running while remaining entirely unseen.
Joanna explained that she had followed those exact rules with religious precision for fourteen hundred hours.
Never once had she violated them.
Camilo remained motionless, a cold, heavy stone settling in his stomach. No one had ever needed to explicitly tell him to ignore her; the entire domestic machinery of his home had been architected so that she would vanish automatically the moment he came anywhere near her.
He forced himself to ask the next logical, agonizing question: What had happened to her hands?
Joanna hesitated, her fearful gaze darting toward the upper floor as though calculating what the raw truth might cost her. Realizing she had nowhere left to hide, she slowly reached into the deep pocket of her apron and withdrew a folded, crumpled piece of thermal paper.
It was not a pay stub from Camilo’s household payroll.
The corporate header at the top belonged to an industrial commercial laundry facility located out in Cicero—a notoriously brutal sweatshop that handled heavy linens for downtown hotels and county hospitals.
According to the timestamps, her life was an impossible, clockwork nightmare.
She worked his estate from 7:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m., cleaning, polishing, and scrubbing nine million dollars' worth of luxury stone and crystal. Then, the moment her shift ended, she drove forty minutes out to Cicero to work another five-hour grueling night shift at the commercial laundry, six nights a week.
She had been working that punishing night shift for eleven months, and various other cash-in-hand night jobs for approximately three years.
At the Cicero facility, her primary duty was sorting through blood-soaked, chemical-treated hotel and hospital linens, manually hauling heavy, waterlogged loads from industrial washing machines, and feeding them through high-heat commercial mangles.
Camilo frowned, staring at the paper. “Do they not provide safety gloves at that facility?”
“Yes, sir,” Joanna whispered.
“Then why in God’s name aren't you using them?”
Joanna went utterly quiet, staring down at the cracked concrete floor.
Camilo waited, his patience wearing thin.
Finally, she was forced to explain the mechanics of her exploitation. The industrial safety gloves were not free; they were aggressively deducted from the workers’ weekly wages. Each cheap rubberized pair cost $3.50, and due to the corrosive chemicals and heavy friction of the wet linens, a pair disintegrated and shredded within four nights. To save money for her rent and medical bills, Joanna had stopped buying them months ago, choosing to let her bare skin absorb the punishment instead of sacrificing grocery money.
Camilo looked down at the financial breakdown printed on the pay stub.
Gross income for two weeks of backbreaking, dual-shift labor:
$2,314.
Then came the itemized deductions:
$2,180.
Net take-home pay:
$134.
Camilo read those three tragic lines three separate times, the numbers refusing to compute in his disciplined brain. “What are these deductions?” he demanded, his voice dropping into a dangerous register.
“A loan, sir,” Joanna breathed, tears spilling over her lashes.
“From whom?”
“I... I don't know the name of the company. A private lending group.”
Three years earlier, when she had been desperate to cover an emergency medical crisis for her adoptive mother, she had signed paperwork shoved in front of her by a predatory lending agency operating out of a strip mall. Ever since that day, money had begun disappearing automatically through payroll garnishments. Despite calling their toll-free number weekly, she had never once received a physical copy of the original promissory note.
Camilo’s jaw clenched so hard a muscle ticked in his cheek. “How much do you still owe them?”
“Seventy-one thousand dollars.”
“How much did you actually borrow in the beginning?”
Joanna paused, swallowing hard. “Ten thousand.”
Ten thousand dollars had mutated into seventy-one thousand through compounded, predatory interest rates and manufactured administrative penalties.
Camilo exhaled slowly, his mind racing as he calculated the mathematics of her absolute enslavement. He asked what she lived on, given that a two-week paycheck yielded a pathetic one hundred and thirty-four dollars.
The money from the Marquetti household came through a third-party domestic agency payroll system, which was also heavily siphoned by garnishments and agency fees. But the Cicero laundry paid its night shift workers separately in weekly cash envelopes, approximately $2,600 each month. Because that secondary income bypassed the formal banking system and automated tax garnishments, it was the only thing keeping her alive.
Camilo asked how much of that cash she had managed to save over three years of double-shifting her existence.
“Nothing, sir.”
Her adoptive mother, an elderly woman named Eileen Callahan, lived in a specialized memory-care nursing facility up in Evanston. The total monthly cost of care was $6,200. Federal insurance and state assistance covered a portion of it, leaving Joanna legally and personally responsible for a remaining balance of $2,400 every single month.
The nursing home payment was rigorously due on the fifth of every month, without exception.
In thirty-six consecutive months, Joanna had never missed a single payment. Not once.
She stated that singular fact with a quiet, heartbreaking shred of human dignity that hit Camilo harder than a physical blow.
Camilo pressed further, needing to map the boundaries of her suffering. He asked how often she managed to visit Eileen at the Evanston facility.
“Sundays,” she replied softly. “It’s the only day of the week I don't work the night shift.”
“When do you sleep, Joanna?”
“On the bus, sir.”
The CTA transit ride from her Cicero laundry shift down to the lakefront estate took approximately forty minutes each morning. She usually managed to catch thirty minutes of troubled sleep against the cold window glass. Sometimes, if she was lucky, she curled up on a stack of spare linens in a quiet storage room between morning household chores.
Camilo stopped asking questions.
Every single answer she offered forced him to confront another horrific condition she had quietly accepted as her normal baseline in a city where he ruled the shadows.
He looked down at the crumpled pay stub once more. One hundred and thirty-four dollars for two weeks of relentless physical labor inside a lakeside mansion worth nine million dollars.
With agonizing care, Camilo folded the paper and tucked it neatly inside the inner pocket of his coat.
Joanna’s eyes tracked the movement with immediate alarm. “That’s mine, sir. Please.”
May you like
“I know. I need to hold onto it for a few days.”
Joanna hesitated, biting her lower lip, but ultimately nodded in defeated submission.
