Chapter Nine – Ordinary Monster

 She woke late, as always. No alarm. No boss waiting to mark her late. The blinds stayed drawn, keeping the morning sun out.

Her first thoughts weren’t about coffee or breakfast — they were about money. Not the way ordinary people thought about it, balancing bills against a paycheck. For her, it was calculation: how much had come in, how much could be moved without drawing attention, and how long before the next call.

She lived alone, and she liked it that way. No roommate to ask questions. No partner to pry. Solitude was safety. And it gave her time to think.

At the grocery store, she blended in: ball cap pulled low, casual jacket, sneakers. To the clerk ringing through her items, she was just another customer buying milk, bread, a bottle of whiskey. But in her head, the math never stopped. The clerk’s hourly wage wouldn’t buy a decent meal. She could make that with a single call — a shaky voice, a well-placed threat.

She paid in cash. Always cash. And left without meeting the clerk’s eyes.

Back in her apartment, she sat at the small kitchen table, watching condensation slide down the whiskey glass. The place was neat but soulless — furniture chosen for function, not comfort. No decorations. Decorations left trails, revealed tastes, made you memorable. She preferred to be no one.

That didn’t mean she was empty. Her head was crowded with voices — not hallucinations, but the echoes of everyone she’d ever played. The desperate grandson. The stern CRA officer. The patient technician. She could still hear them as clearly as her own. Sometimes she practiced in the mirror, shifting tone and pitch, watching her lips shape other people’s words. It amused her how easily the human ear could be fooled.

Lazy in body, sharp in mind — that’s how she saw herself. Why grind through traffic, endure meetings, answer to people less intelligent than her, when the world was full of shortcuts? She was proof that effort was overrated. Brains and nerve could buy more than any steady job ever would.

The scams had made her rich. Not rich enough to be careless, but comfortably invisible. Six figures, year after year, hidden, shifted, laundered until even she lost track of the routes. But it wasn’t just the money. It was the feeling — power. To pick up a phone, spin a story, and watch someone fold.

At night, that was what she thought about. Not family. Not friends. She had neither, and preferred it that way. She thought about the voices — the ones who cracked, the ones who begged, the ones who wired away pensions and savings, convinced they were serving justice or saving someone they loved.

She poured another drink and whispered into the empty room, “They’re all the same.”

Then she smiled. Tomorrow, she’d prove it again.