Chapter 1
10pm. Mona finishes her work and quickly grabs her bag to catch the last bus home. She lives less than 15 minutes from her company and is used to walking from her work to her house.
However, the weather was really bad today, the weather in this part of the country is never sunny so she is used to rain but the weather was exceptionally bad, the meteorologist even recommended not to go out for today.
The bus stops, there is only one or two minutes left before she arrives home.
The thunder seems to rumble louder with each step Mona takes, she starts to walk a little faster and, a few seconds later, starts to run. After what seemed like centuries, she is finally there, in front of her home. As she reaches for her bag to get her keys, she notices something. Another key was in the hole, and Mona swore to herself that there was no way she would forget something like that. A few seconds later, she realizes that it is in fact possible, as it has happened to her several times over the past few months. She decides not to think about it too much and quickly walks into the room while the thunder still rumbles aggressively.
Throwing her bag on the table, the first thing she notices is the missing pink gold vase she inherited from her late grandmother. She is sure now that the keys on her door were NOT hers.
Her first instinctive reaction is to check the camera footage to see what else was stolen. She views the footage and sees a man, who appears to be tall. She couldn’t see his face because he was wearing what appeared to be a hood or balaclava. Nothing alarms her too much on the video, he took some jewelry from a drawer, the vase, and some money. Robberies were common in this part of town, which explains her deadly calm in this situation. She found herself the victim of this phenomenon 6 to 8 times in just 2 months. She turns off the video and immediately calls the police to report yet another theft.
Although she is devastated by the disappearance of her beloved vase, she decides not to think about it too much, hoping that once the thief is caught, her vase will be back to her at the same time, and heads to the bathroom to take a bath as she is still wearing her clothes wet from the rain. In her bath, trying to think of something else, Mona suddenly remembers a strange detail on the camera footage. Now that she thinks about it...
The man certainly had some sort of large knife in his hand... Wait, no, it was a cleaver.
The young woman unconsciously starts to get tears in her eyes as she finally realizes the gravity of the situation and what could have possibly happened if she hadn’t been forced to leave the house to go to work today. This man probably knew that going out was inadvisable, even almost forbidden, today because of the weather. He was definitely there for her and not really for the things he took with him.
Another detail that poor, poor Mona doesn’t seem to have noticed is...
...the man...
...the footage never showed him leaving the house.
Just as Mona is about to leave the bath. Two loud aggressive knocks on her door seem to echo throughout the city.
He is standing there, just outside the bathroom. The cleaver in his hand.
Oh, Mona.
If only you had seen that I was watching you as you entered the house, I was right under your nose, under the table, the vase in my hand.
