Revenge13 min read
The Thirteen Cameras and the Public Reckoning
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I named every camera.
I sat in the dark room and gave each of the thirteen lenses a small human name so I could feel less like an observer and more like an owner. Camera One watched the front door. Camera Two watched the hallway. Camera Three watched the living room from a vase of fake orchids. Camera Seven was tucked into the frame of the full-length mirror in her bedroom. All of them fed to my wall of screens, and the wall of screens fed me Everlee.
"I like watching her when she thinks nobody is looking," I told myself aloud that first night. "I like knowing the way she breathes when she sleeps."
"That's sick," I heard my own voice answer back, distorted and soft in the dark. I swallowed and laughed, but I didn't turn the screens off.
Everlee Evans was the kind of beauty that people gave metaphors to and then complained that language had failed them. I called her "my moon" to myself. She was small enough to fit against my chest and tall enough to fill a ballroom. She had a laugh like somebody opening a window. She had a job she loved and a boss who regarded competence like a weapon. His name was Alfonso Chambers.
That evening she came home from a company dinner in a navy backless dress, heels clicking against the corridor. I watched the motion on screen, watched her shrug off a silvery shawl and pad into the bathroom.
"You're late," I typed into the private note on my own screen and read it back like a prayer. Everlee hummed a tune under the hot water. She didn't know I had named every inch of her life.
"Did you have a good evening?" I asked when her phone lit up, and she picked up.
"It was long," she said from the bathroom. "My boss was terrible, but the food was good."
"Alfonso?" I tried to sound casual. "Did he walk you home?"
"He offered," she said. "But he left first. I wanted to slip in and clean my face."
"Don't be alone so late," I said.
"I won't. Goodnight."
"Goodnight, love."
She never looked at the mirror long enough to see Camera Seven's tiny red lens. She never checked her phone for apps that could scan a room for hidden devices. She didn't know that on the left edge of the frame there was an eleven-millimeter hole, a pupil in the world.
I fed myself rituals. I labeled the files. I timestamped. I drank Red Bull until my hands trembled. The footage filled a hard drive until it sang—1,344 gigabytes—little pieces of her spread across them like pages from a diary. It felt like power. It felt like love.
"I would never hurt you," I whispered into the dark.
"Would you?" my chest answered back.
The thing about owning a life is that you start to feel entitled to its shadows. When Everlee said, in the glow of her laptop light, "Alfonso's men are ridiculous, but he knows how to shut the room down," I didn't like it. When she smiled after she hung up, I moved my hand across the screen as if to touch her, and the pixels answered.
The cameras made memory into proof. They turned ordinary mornings into a map: what time she watered the houseplant, what shelf she kept her late-night face masks on, the exact second she rolled the towel from her thigh. One quiet stormy night she called me, "Are you awake?"
"Always," I lied.
"Good. I just wanted to hear your voice before I sleep."
"Sleep then," I said. The screens blinked. She washed her face. She kissed the air, not knowing I catalogued that kiss on a labeled folder named "KISSES_0324." I knew the wash of water, the smell of her shampoo, the pattern of her yawns. I loved her in file form.
She told me about her new boss long before I ever thought to follow them into a car. "He's a monster at work," she said. "But he fights for people. It's not all bad."
"Then I don't like him," I said.
"You don't need to like him," she answered. "You need to like me."
That line should have soothed me. Instead, it grew thorns.
I installed the last camera in the cheap vase because it meant I could watch her from the most private angle. I also put a small lens into the frame of the photo where we were both young and sheepish. There, I watched her forehead warm against my shoulder, and I told myself I was keeping a shrine.
"You're overdoing it," I told my reflection. "You'll be fine. She loves you."
The truth is, she didn't know how many eyes were on her. She didn't know how many red-lit dots looked like constellations all across her world.
Three nights after that, she came home with lipstick at the corner of her mouth and a paper bag of gifts in her hands.
"She seems happier," I said into the microphone I kept by my chair.
"Because he keeps the wolves away," someone in my head answered.
"Who?" I said to nobody.
Alfonso Chambers had made an appearance in my life by association long before I met him in the flesh. On camera Alfonso's silhouette was tall and steady, a man who used his voice like a blueprint. He once cleared the office of bothersome male admirers by saying two words and the room folded up like paper. Everlee was grateful. I learned to hate gratitude.
I put a camera in Alfonso's car. It was small, tucked behind the glove box, no one would notice. I put a camera in the company lobby when I sneaked in once under the guise of an informational visit. I practiced smiles in the metal of my own teeth.
The day they were assigned to travel for work, my heart went as thin as a blade.
"You're going to be fine," Everlee said on the phone when I asked if she was scared.
"Don't go alone?" I asked.
"It's a two-day trip," she said. "Alfonso is driving. He'll get me there."
"Stay on the group chat," I demanded.
"I will."
In the car, behind the steering wheel, my camera number slipped into Alfonso's cabin like a snail into its shell. I had planned to watch them from a distance, maybe drive near hotel lobbies, maybe set up the camera in the bathroom mirror of their next stop. I wanted to know where they were, every second of it. I was not prepared for the way the world could tilt in two heartbeats.
At the hotel, I rented a room beside Alfonso's. I sat just outside the door, listening to corridor conversations, clenching my hands until I felt bone on bone. My phone buzzed. Everlee's name flashed.
"Meeting went long," she texted. "I'm fine."
Three minutes later, I saw them enter the hallway on camera.
"Stay here," I told myself. "Don't go in. Just watch."
Alfonso called, steady voice in the cabin, "Everlee, I need you in room 1288. Please."
"Is it about work?" she asked.
"Mostly," he said. "I need to tell you about the client. Come in."
"Okay," she said.
She knocked. She stepped into the room. The door closed.
I had tools for peeking through a peephole. I had a device that reflected the light in such a way it let me watch through the eye like a god. Through it, I saw Alfonso move backward into the room. I saw him reaching for something on a side table. Then, in a slowness that will chase me into sleepless decades, I watched him take up a blade.
"What are you seeing?" I asked the empty hotel hallway like a man begging a god.
Alfonso stepped forward and plunged the knife down.
Everlee shrieked.
"No," I said to the glass of the peephole. "No."
The thing the glass showed me that second had only one meaning: blood on the carpet, Everlee collapsed, Alfonso standing cool as a man closing a book.
I kicked the door.
I ran. I broke the hotel vase in the hallway with my shoulder. I climbed the stairs three at a time. I locked onto Alfonso's door with the reflex of a murderer. I did not stop to think.
"Open the door!" I banged. "Open up!"
I had the peep-hole reflection like an animal's, and I had my own bloody breath. The door was locked. Inside, the new scene played—the worst I could imagine without knowing its details—so I kicked, and then I found the cracked edge and the handle gave, and the room opened like a stage.
There she was, on the carpet, blood.
The rational part of my mind froze. The part that loved her imagined it; the part that wanted to protect her turned into a machine.
"Everlee!" I shouted. "Everlee!"
I saw the wound. I saw the red that smelled like iron. Pride turned to panic. Panic turned to planning. I checked the corridor for witnesses. No one. The hotel camera in the hallway hung like a moon that watched me as I acted.
It is a strange thing how hands remember the wrongness of what they are about to do. I cleaned. I scrubbed. I wiped. I took towels and worked with the desperation of someone trying to stitch paper into cloth. I moved like an actor in a play I'd practiced. If a man loves a woman enough, he will stage a crime for her.
I carried what I thought were pieces of her into my rented car and drove like a beast in heat down highway 93. A little later I stopped at a dead-end, dragged the suitcase into brambles, left the evidence buried in roots, and drove away. I burned my clothes in a pan in the kitchen to erase my scent. I poured liquor over the flesh of my wrong actions.
The rest became a sequence of bad choices like stepping stones across an icy river.
I couldn't sleep. I couldn't process the truth that I had been witness to a crime and then become the accomplice of a mess of panic. I put a towel over my head and pushed my forehead into the floor. Then I called the wrong people. Then I tried to become clever.
The sleep that finally took me became the beginning of the unspooling.
"You're losing it," Miriam said the day I staggered into her office, smelling like cheap bourbon and worse things. Her voice was calm and cool—the hospice nurse of the mind.
"You told me everything would stay useful in the dark," I said as if she might believe.
"Tell me what happened," she said.
"I saw him," I said. "I saw Alfonso."
"Alfonso who?" she asked.
"Alfonso Chambers," I answered.
She watched me like a surgeon ready to make the first cut. "Tell me again."
I told her everything and then not everything. I told her how the red dot on the mirror stared at me and how the camera numbers made me feel in charge. I left out how the cameras made me feel like a god. I left out how my hands trembled when I held her.
"You are sleep deprived," she said. "Trauma, lack of rest, and your existing control patterns will distort memories."
"You're saying it didn't happen?" I asked.
"I'm saying memory is fragile," Miriam said.
"She was on the floor," I insisted.
"You might have seen what you needed to see," Miriam said. She had that professional patience that can feel like a cloak. "You might have hallucinated under stress. There are always choices."
I left more broken than the furniture in Alfonso's hotel suite. I went home and rewound every camera, scrolled through every minute like a man gone mad with hope.
At the same time, a second story was being built without my permission. Everlee was not dead. She had been wounded—yes—but not beyond saving. The scenes I had seen had been altered, staged by hands that wanted to save and to ensnare. Alfonso had not been the thoughtless killer I imagined. He had been part of a plan.
Plan—what a word for people who bleed.
Liesel Barron had been a footnote in my life until she wasn't. She was an ex—someone I had circled and controlled in smaller ways. There were others. There was Miriam. Alfonso had his own reach. They met in a bar on an ordinary night and executed a scheme that tasted like revenge and like medicine. They had watched me with their own contraptions. They had learned to speak my code and used it against me.
When I finally confronted Everlee—when I found the door open and the apartment dim and her small figure sitting at the table with a cast on her leg—I had a thousand apologies parked like cars with dead batteries.
"Why did you do it?" I snarled before I could stop myself. "Why make me think—"
"Because you needed to see yourself," she said.
"See myself?" I laughed, whether from pain or madness I didn't know. "I saw you dead."
"You did see me," she said. "But you saw the part you wanted to see. You saw your own justification."
"Alfonso—"
"Alfonso is not the monster you think," she said. "He staged what you thought you saw. He kept me safe and he kept you in place. It was dangerous, yes. We needed you to confront what you had become."
She hurt when she moved. "We filmed you," she said quietly. "We filmed the cameras you installed. The files. The notes. We let you follow the story all the way to the point where you made a choice you could never come back from."
"I didn't—" My voice broke. "I didn't mean to—"
"Meaning doesn't erase," Everlee said. "But the world can see now."
We did not drag the truth out into a police station with whispers. We did something worse.
We set a public stage.
On a damp evening, a cluster of people gathered at a local bar: friends, strangers, coworkers, and the press. Alfonso, tall as a cathedral in a dark suit, stood at the front with a thumb drive clenched like a talisman. Miriam sat beside him, steady as a clock. Liesel limped forward on her bad leg, smile calm and rubber. Everlee's hair fell over a pale collar and she walked without flinching. I was brought, not by hand but by the collapse of every door I'd bolted.
"Why?" I asked aloud when they flicked the lights on and every eye found me like a meteor. "Why do this here?"
"Because this is where you learn to be seen," Alfonso said. He sounded almost sad. "Because you made a theater of her life."
They put my cameras up on the screen one by one.
"Thirteen," Everlee said. "Thirteen cameras. Named. Time-stamped. Filed."
"You watched me?" a man near the bar said, and the words landed like thrown stones.
"I loved her," I said.
"Love is not ownership," Miriam said. "You were not protecting. You were enclosing."
The footage played. They showed me installing the vase camera. They showed me laughing in my apartment with my own reflection as I planned to follow them. They showed how I hid the lens under the frame of our photograph. They showed me rent the room next to Alfonso's at the hotel. They showed the vanishing point where I thought a crime had happened.
"But that's evidence of them killing her," I stammered. "The knife—"
"We edited what you saw," Everlee said softly. "We edited to show you the worst version of yourself. You needed to condemn yourself."
The bar murmured. A woman called out, "This is illegal!" The bartender was already on his feet, but Alfonso had anticipated that too. They had the recording rights, they had witnesses, and they had the law on their side. The camera lenses had been planted by me, but the footage of my own acts belonged to the public when consent and deception were exposed.
"What did you think you were when you hid cameras everywhere?" Liesel said, voice steady, the kind that peels paint. "A guardian? A lover? A god?"
The crowd hissed. Phones lifted like a thousand palms to the lit faces.
"That's him," somebody said. "That's the man who ruined things."
I tried to speak. My mouth felt full of cotton. "You staged my wife—"
"She's not your wife," a stranger snapped. "Do you think that makes a difference?"
A cluster of journalists had been given material in advance. They had redacted the intimate footage on certain frames, but the pattern was clear: covert surveillance, trespass, harassment. The legal team that Alfonso had quietly hired that week stood in the wings like wolves in suits.
"You're under a civil suit as well as criminal investigation," one reporter said into a microphone. "Has anyone called the police?"
"Yes," Alfonso said. "They will be here."
Someone in the back recorded the whole event on a handheld livestream. The number of viewers climbed into the thousands. I watched the counter like a new gauge of shame.
"Now," Miriam said, standing. "Tell them why you watched, Duke."
"I wanted to protect her," I whispered.
"You wanted to own," Miriam corrected. "You wanted control. You wanted to sleep with her without being cheated by the world."
"She loves me," I protested, "she loves me—"
"She loved a part of you you refused to be," Everlee said. "But love is not a leash."
Hands pointed, some in anger, some in pity. A man near the door filmed me and shouted, "You're a sick man." Another woman hissed, "You should rot."
They played my confession next—my voice files from the nights I had talked to myself, the recordings that showed premeditation, the admission that I had moved to Alfonso's room, the clean up, the trip to highway 93. My face was there in pixels: frightened, sharp-nosed, a man trying to stitch his own wrongs.
"They're calling the police now," someone said.
I felt a weight press on my chest like a hand. The room closed in.
Then a woman stood up and spoke beyond the microphone. Her voice was bare and certain. "You will not be erased by the law alone," she said. "We want you to see what you've done. We want you to feel what you made others feel."
She paused and the crowd leaned in.
They revealed the 93 highway files—the path I had taken, the vanishing of the suitcase, the staged car crash—everything. The bar saw my mistakes and my panic become a map of choices. The footage of me burning clothes was there. The receipts I had thrown away and then kept were there. My confession to Dr. Miriam under a hypnotic suggestion—this part they presented carefully—showed a man who had told half-truths and full lies.
Then the most public part of it began: the punishment that isn't only about legal consequence.
"Stand up," Alfonso said.
I rose like a puppet.
"Now," Everlee said, and she walked toward me with a slow, deliberate step.
My knees clicked. The crowd held its breath.
"You put hidden cameras in my life and in the lives of women who trusted you," she said. "You stole their private moments and pretended ownership. For that, you will be known."
She pulled from her bag a list. On it were names—women who had been watched. She read them aloud. Each name landed like a verdict. For some names she added small details they might never have guessed I had recorded. The room gasped, shook, whispered. A camera in a corner streamed the whole thing.
"You will not be allowed to walk away," Liesel said. "We will not let you hide behind 'I loved her.'"
They made me stand and listen to reaction. A woman wept openly. A man shouted that I should be imprisoned forever. Someone laughed at me, a short cruel sound that made my ears ring. A teenager raised a placard. "Don't Watch," it read. Others took videos on their phones, and the clips spread like a flame across the city.
"You're going to be arrested," someone said.
"And you're going to be exposed," Miriam added. "But the public needs to see you. They need to name you what you were: a predator who used intimacy as a weapon."
The police arrived not long after. They cuffed me with the clumsy, real hands of law. Cameras surrounded me as they led me out into the wet street. The glass of the bar reflected a man I hardly recognized: hair matted, eyes rimmed raw, a face that two nights ago had believed he had done a noble thing for love.
As they pushed me into the back of the police car, someone from the crowd shouted, "Shame!" Another voice cried, "You deserve it!"
"Do you understand what you did?" a sergeant asked as the vehicle jolted.
"I loved her," I whispered into the collar of my shirt.
Outside, a thousand little screens recorded, streamed, repeated. The silver of my confession multiplied. The public saw the footage, watched my edits, saw the pattern. Petitions came. The bar's livestream had a hundred thousand views that night. My name trended in local feeds and then in national ones. Columns appeared with my face and lists of what I had done.
The punishment was more than legal restraint—it was being stripped in public of the narrative I'd told myself: the narrative of protection. It was being turned into an example. It was the fury of those I had violated, making spectacle of my fall.
The punishment scene lasted a long time. They read the names again. They described the cameras. They described the 93 highway, the discarded suitcase, the pan on the stove. They played the moment I burned my clothes in my own kitchen. They let the city watch me in ways I had once made a career of watching.
When it was over, when lights dimmed and the police car's siren coughed to life, I realized a new thing: that spectacle could be mercy if it stopped others from being hidden.
"Why did you make it public?" I asked Everlee months later, in a small interview room in the facility where I got a court-appointed evaluation.
"Because you needed to be seen," she said again, still calm. "And because we needed to make sure no one else felt alone like we did."
I think about the small red light that glowed in Camera Seven. I think about the file names. I think about the empty screen when I finally had to look at nothing at all.
The punishment did not make me whole. It did not bring back the pieces of privacy I had stolen. The law would take care of prison time and therapy would try to make me less dangerous. But the public scene—our public verdict—did more than indict; it taught me that being seen can heal those you broke.
They ended the night with a line from Everlee that would be broadcast the next morning across every feed.
"Control is not love," she told the camera. "And cameras do not substitute for trust."
I tried to speak after that. The city had made me mute for a while.
The last thing I remember before they loaded me into the car was the soft click of a phone camera returning to a thousand other phones, and the tiny red dot of Camera Seven on a screen I had once owned.
The End
— Thank you for reading —