The Room

Act I. Honeymoon in a Cage

Arthur's "smart home" resembled not a dwelling, but a server station mistakenly erected on the edge of a cliff. Concrete, glass, and the quiet, barely perceptible hum of the climate control system.

Arthur stood in the hall, adjusting the cuffs of his perfectly fitting dark blue jacket. He looked at Eva not as a loving husband, but as a collector appraising a rare, fragile exhibit.

“Everything here is yours,” he said in an even voice, handing her a thin, almost weightless key card made of white plastic.

“Spend my money, manage the servants, change the interior. But I have one condition.”

Eva accepted the card. Her fingers didn't tremble. She knew how to play the role of the grateful Cinderella.

“Which is?”

“Never go down to the server room in the basement,” Arthur nodded toward the elevator. “Those are work matters. Dirt, digital dust, the underside of business. You don't need that.”

Arthur left an hour later. Eva remained alone in the huge, empty house.

For the first three days, she enjoyed life: ordering designer clothes, drinking vintage wine, and swimming in the heated pool.

But on the fourth day, she got bored. Eva was not the naive girl she portrayed for Arthur. She was a predator.

In her past were defrauded investors, sham marriages, and people whose lives she had broken for profit. She was sure Arthur was her main prize, her "pension fund." But to secure her position, she needed leverage. This was her old, proven scheme: find the dirt, threaten divorce, and sue for half the fortune.

She started rummaging through her husband's things. The office was sterile. The computer was protected by biometrics. No papers, no letters.

Then she started looking for information about his ex-wives. There were three of them. But there wasn't a word about them online. No obituaries, no photos from new places of residence. They had simply vanished. Dissolved.

“He killed them,” Eva whispered, looking at her reflection in the black glass of the window. There was no fear in her eyes. Only excitement. If he was a killer and she found proof, she would have him on a hook forever.

Act II. The Breach

On the fifth night, Eva went down to the elevator. She knew how to bypass simple restrictions. While Arthur slept before his departure, she had managed to make a copy of his access through the "smart watch" he had carelessly left on the nightstand.

The elevator slid silently down to the minus second floor. The doors opened, and Eva was hit by the cold air of the conditioners.

Before her was a massive steel door. She applied the copied digital key. The lock beeped, and the indicator changed from red to green.

Eva entered, expecting to see freezers, jars of formalin, or at least bloodied instruments. But the room was sterile and clean. In the middle stood a single comfortable leather chair. And in front of it was a huge wall-sized panel of dozens of dark monitors.

“Is this it?” she drawled disappointedly. She walked to the desk and touched the touch panel.

The wall of screens flared with cold white light. Eva froze. The screens didn't show the past wives. The screens showed her.

Here was a black-and-white recording from a surveillance camera ten years ago: Eva (then still a blonde) pushing her best friend under the wheels of a car in a parking lot to take her place at a firm. Here were scans of medical records from an underground clinic — abortions, plastic surgery, a changed face. Here was a transcript of her phone conversations with an accomplice a week ago: "This idiot suspects nothing. I'll clean him out in a year." Here were photos of people she had ruined, now drunkards and homeless.

In this room, her entire past was collected. Every sin, every lie she had so carefully erased from her biography was documented here in 4K resolution.

In the center of the table lay a thin folder. Eva opened it with trembling hands. The heading read: "Eva. Psychological Portrait. Prognosis: Incurable. Sociopathy of an active type."

Act III. The Stain

Terror pierced the back of her head like an icy needle. He knew. He knew everything from the very beginning. Eva rushed to the keyboard.

“Delete! Delete everything!” she hissed, drumming on the keys. But the system didn't react.

A red window popped up on the central screen: "Attention, administrator access notified. Protocol 'Truth' activated."

This was that very "stain." Not magic, not blood, but a digital footprint. A login log that cannot be erased.

The phone in her pocket vibrated — a notification from the "smart home" arrived: "External perimeter locked. Await owner."

Eva ran out of the room. It seemed to her that her hands were sticky and red. She rubbed them against her white blouse, but there were no stains — it was a hallucination, the phantom dirt of her own conscience, now dragged into the light.

She rushed to the exit, but the doors of the house were locked. The blinds on the windows lowered. The house had turned into a crypt.

Finale. The Return

Two hours passed. Eva sat in the corner of the huge living room, clutching a kitchen knife in her hand. The front door clicked, and Arthur entered.

He was calm and didn't even look at the knife. Arthur took off his jacket, neatly hung it on the back of a chair, and poured himself some water.

“Don't come near me!” Eva screamed. Her voice broke into a squeal. “You're a maniac! You spy on people! You killed them all!”

Arthur sighed wearily and sat in the chair opposite.

“I haven't killed a single wife, Eva.”

He took out a tablet and tossed it onto her lap. On the screen were videos from closed psychiatric clinics. Women in straitjackets. Women staring at the wall. Women screaming into the void.

“I was simply looking for the one who has nothing to hide,” Arthur said quietly. “The one who won't enter that room because she isn't afraid of her past. Or the one who enters, sees herself, and... repents.”

He looked her straight in the eye. His gaze was not evil, but clinically detached, like a doctor giving a hopeless diagnosis.

“The previous 'wives'... they broke. They couldn't withstand meeting themselves without masks. When you tear off the facade, sometimes there is emptiness or rot underneath.”

“Will you kill me?” whispered Eva, dropping the knife.

“Why?” Arthur was genuinely surprised. “You are already dead.”

“That 'Eva' — perfect, kind, unhappy, whom you invented and sold to me — was destroyed in that room downstairs. She is no more.” He stood up and headed for the exit.

“And with the real you... it is impossible to live.”

He walked out of the house, leaving the door open. Eva was left alone in the huge, echoing hall. She looked into the mirror. The face of a monster, twisted with fear and malice, looked back at her.

In the silence of the house, a quiet chuckle was heard. Then another. Eva began to laugh. The laughter became louder, higher, until it turned into a long, inhuman howl, echoing off the concrete walls of her golden cage.