My Very Own Monster

Louisa’s POV

The cream silk felt like a mockery against my skin.

I let my fingers trail down the length of the skirt, tracing the fluid, expensive shimmer of the fabric. It was soft—frighteningly soft—a stark contrast to the scratchy, pilled wool of the uniforms I had worn for eighteen years at the orphanage back in Australia. Back home, everything was rough; the soap, the sheets, the expectations. Here, everything was smooth and polished, designed to hide the jagged edges underneath.

I raised my eyes from the dress to the wall in front of me. It wasn't a window, but a massive, floor-to-ceiling wallpaper of the city skyline. New York.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. I had spent years tucked under thin blankets in a crowded dormitory, whispering with the other girls about the world beyond the gates. We all had our "dream" cities, the places we’d go once we were finally chosen. Mine had always been New York. I had imagined the lights, the movement, the feeling of being somewhere that never went cold or quiet. And now, I was finally here. I had crossed the ocean, left the only dirt I had ever known, and landed right in the heart of the dream.

But the dream felt hollow.

I looked at my reflection, hardly recognizing the girl staring back. They had "dolled me up," as the Matrons back home would say. My hair was perfect, my face painted into a mask of porcelain innocence. I looked like a gift waiting to be unwrapped, yet I still didn't understand the occasion.

All my life, the prayers at the orphanage were the same. We prayed for the "Golden Call." We prayed for the childless couples with kind eyes, the philanthropists looking for a legacy, the loving families who would see us not as burdens, but as daughters. I had watched them come and go for nearly two decades. I watched my friends get adopted, one by one, their small suitcases packed with hope as they walked out the front gates.

No one ever really wanted me.

Each time a couple visited, I would stand in line, shoulders back, heart hammering against my ribs, only to watch them pick someone else. Slowly, my worst nightmares had started to take shape. I became one of them—one of the girls who didn't get away. We were the "unwanteds," the ones who watched the clock tick toward our eighteenth birthdays with a growing sense of dread.

In the dark of the dormitories, the rumors were our only currency. We whispered about what happened to the ones who reached the age limit. Some girls said we were slaughtered, our bodies used to serve as protein for the meals of those left behind. It was a gruesome, childish fantasy born of fear, but the reality offered by the officials wasn't much clearer. The Matrons told us that not getting adopted wasn't the end of the world. They said we were special, that we would be given "placements." We would travel, work, get paid, and live as adults in different countries.

They weren't wrong. Not entirely.

Because here I was, eighteen and "employed." I had been flown across the world to the city of my dreams. I was in a room that cost more than the orphanage’s entire annual budget. But as I sat there, the silence of the dressing room felt heavy, suffocating. I had been told I was starting my "first night at work," but no one had explained the job description. No one had told me why I needed a silk dress or why my heart felt like it was trying to escape my chest. I was unsure of what was expected of me, or why the air in this beautiful city tasted so much like fear.

"Louisa!"

The sharp whisper made me flinch. I turned my head as the door creaked open. It was the older girl—the only person who had spoken a word to me since I arrived this morning. She didn't look at my eyes; she looked at the dress, her expression unreadable, a mixture of pity and steel.

"It’s time," she whispered, her voice barely carrying across the plush carpet.

I didn't answer. I couldn't. I simply gave a small, jerky nod and stood up, the cream silk rustling around my legs as I moved away from the dressing chair and toward the door. Toward whatever New York had waiting for me in the dark.

The Movement from the dressing room to the car felt like being moved like a piece of furniture.

The older girl didn’t hold my hand. She didn’t offer a parting word of comfort. She simply led me through a series of back hallways, away from the plush carpets and into a subterranean garage that smelled of exhaust and expensive wax. A black sedan was already waiting, its engine idling with a low, predatory hum that vibrated in the soles of my thin shoes.

I climbed into the back seat, the cream silk of my dress bunching uncomfortably around my thighs. The door closed with a heavy, pressurized thud that seemed to suck the remaining oxygen out of the cabin.

Click.

The automatic locks engaged. It was a small sound, but in the silence of the car, it sounded like a gavel hitting a bench. Sentence passed.

As we pulled out of the garage and into the streets of Manhattan, I pressed my forehead against the glass. The windows were tinted so heavily that the vibrant, neon-soaked city I had dreamed of for eighteen years looked bruised—a landscape of deep purples and shadows. It felt distant, like I was watching a movie of a life I wasn't allowed to join. The New York I had seen on the wallpaper was bright and inviting; the New York through these windows was a graveyard of cold stone and steel.

The driver didn’t speak. He didn’t even look at me through the rearview mirror. He sat like a statue, his gloved hands steady on the wheel, navigating the grid with a clinical efficiency that made my stomach twist. I wanted to ask where we were going. I wanted to ask what "work" looked like at ten o'clock at night. But the words died in my throat, choked back by the sheer, oppressive quiet of the car. I sat in my fear, letting it wrap around me like a second skin, watching the streetlights blur into long, jagged lines of light.

Eventually, the towering skyscrapers began to thin, replaced by the iron-wrought gates and sprawling estates of an area that felt even more removed from reality.

We turned into a driveway that seemed to go on forever. There were no sidewalk lights here, only the glow of the car’s headlamps cutting through the darkness of manicured trees. When the property finally came into view, it didn't look like a home. It was a massive, modern structure of glass and concrete, standing sharp and cold against the night sky.

The scale of it made me feel microscopic.

It was too quiet. Back at the orphanage, silence was a luxury we never had; there was always the sound of someone breathing, a floorboard creaking, a distant siren. Here, the wealth felt like it had been used to buy a total absence of sound. The lights were already on inside the house, spilling out onto the stone path, making the whole place look like a stage set waiting for a performance to begin. There were no visible staff, no welcoming committee. Just a pristine, impersonal fortress that felt like a controlled environment, designed to keep the world out and whatever was inside, in.

I didn't belong here. I could feel it in the way my breath hitched, in the way the silk felt too thin against the sudden chill of the air-conditioned interior as the driver finally opened my door.

I was led into a foyer that echoed with the sound of my own footsteps. A woman appeared from a side room—she wasn't a Matron, but she had that same hollow, efficient look in her eyes. She didn't greet me. She didn't ask my name.

She stepped close, her fingers cold as she reached out to tuck a stray lock of hair behind my ear. Her touch was clinical, devoid of any warmth. She adjusted the strap of my dress, her eyes roaming over my face like a mechanic checking an engine. She wiped a smudge of invisible dust from my collarbone and stepped back, nodding to herself.

"Remember," she said, her voice low and unhelpful, "do not speak unless he addresses you. Do as he says. It’s a simple arrangement, Louisa. Don't make it complicated."

She didn't explain what the arrangement was. She didn't tell me who "he" was. She just pointed toward a set of heavy double doors at the end of the hall.

I was prepared. I was polished. I was ready for delivery.

I stood there for a heartbeat, my hands trembling against the cream fabric of my skirt, realizing that I wasn't being guided into my new life—I was being pushed into a void. I took a breath, the air tasting of expensive lilies and filtered oxygen, and walked toward the doors.

The doors didn’t open with a sound.

For a second, I thought I had imagined the instruction—thought I had been left standing in that long, echoing hallway for nothing. But then the seam between the panels shifted, slow and deliberate, and a thin line of dim light spilled through the crack.

I stepped forward.

Crossing the threshold didn’t feel like entering a room. It felt like stepping into something that had already been waiting for me.

The air changed first.

Cooler. Filtered. Still.

The doors closed behind me with a quiet finality that pressed against my back, sealing me inside before I could even think to turn around. I stood there for a moment, just inside the room, my fingers curling slightly into the soft fabric of my dress as my eyes adjusted to the low, controlled lighting.

It wasn’t dark. Not really.

Everything was visible—just softened. Intentional.

The space was vast, stretching out in clean lines and pale tones. White dominated everything. White sheets spread across an impossibly large bed, untouched and perfectly smooth, like no one had ever slept there. White walls, broken only by subtle textures and glass. White curtains that hung in long, weightless folds from ceiling to floor, barely moving, as if even the air had been trained to behave.

It was beautiful.

Too beautiful.

Not warm. Not lived-in. Just… flawless.

Like the wallpaper skyline I had stared at earlier—perfect from a distance, hollow up close.

My gaze drifted, slow and uncertain, taking in the edges of the room, the low table, the polished surfaces that reflected light without holding onto it. Everything felt expensive in a way I didn’t have words for. Clean in a way that made me feel like the only thing in the room that didn’t belong.

And then—

I felt him before I fully saw him.

A shift.

Not movement. Presence.

My eyes lifted toward the far end of the room, toward the wall of glass that stretched from floor to ceiling. The city lay beyond it, distant and glowing, a scatter of lights pressed against the dark.

He stood there.

Still.

For a moment, I thought he might not even turn. That I would just stand there, small and out of place, while he remained exactly as he was—untouched by my presence, unaffected.

Then he moved.

Not abruptly. Not with any kind of urgency.

Just… a slow, measured shift, like he had already decided what he was going to do long before I walked in.

He didn’t come toward me.

Instead, he turned away from the window and walked across the room, his steps quiet against the polished floor. There was no hesitation in him, no awareness of the space around him the way I had—like he didn’t need to look to know where everything was. Like this place, this silence, belonged to him completely.

My eyes followed him without meaning to.

He stopped at a low table near the side of the room, reaching for a bottle—dark glass catching the dim light—and a pair of glasses. The sound of liquid pouring was soft, controlled, the only thing breaking the silence.

It echoed more than it should have.

I realized then that I hadn’t moved.

I was still standing near the door, exactly where I had entered, my body locked in place like I had forgotten how to take another step.

He hadn’t looked at me yet.

Not properly.

And somehow, that made it worse.

The fabric of his robe shifted slightly as he moved, loose and unbothered, the silk catching the light in a way that made it look almost liquid. It hung open without care, like modesty wasn’t something he had ever needed to think about. Everything about him felt… unguarded, but not in a vulnerable way.

In a controlled way.

Like nothing in this room had the power to touch him unless he allowed it.

My throat felt dry.

I swallowed, my fingers tightening again against the skirt of my dress as I forced myself to take a step forward. Then another. Each movement felt too loud, too noticeable, even though the room swallowed the sound almost immediately.

Halfway across the space, he finally looked at me.

It wasn’t quick.

It wasn’t sharp.

It was slow. Deliberate.

His gaze moved over me in silence, not lingering in the way I had imagined it would—no hunger, no obvious interest. Just… assessment.

Like he was trying to understand something.

I felt it everywhere.

In the way my shoulders stiffened. In the way my breathing grew shallow under the weight of it. I didn’t know where to look, didn’t know what he expected from me, didn’t know what I was supposed to do with my hands or my voice or the fear sitting heavy in my chest.

So I did nothing.

I stood there and let him look.

The silence stretched.

It grew heavier the longer it lasted, filling the space between us until it felt like something solid, something I could choke on if I tried to speak.

He didn’t rush it.

Didn’t fill it.

He just… let it exist.

Then, without breaking that same quiet rhythm, he picked up one of the glasses and walked toward me.

Each step was unhurried. Certain.

I didn’t realize I had stopped breathing until he was close enough that I could feel the shift in the air again, subtle but undeniable.

He held the glass out to me.

My hands hesitated before lifting, my fingers brushing against the cool surface as I took it from him. The scent reached me immediately—sharp, unfamiliar, burning before it even touched my lips.

I looked up, just briefly, not long enough to hold his gaze.

He was already watching me.

Waiting.

“Drink with me.” he said.