PART 2 — “THIS ISN’T THE FIRST TIME”

I stared at the host’s message for what felt like an eternity.

“You fool… This is…”

That was it.

Three dots.

Nothing else.

I refreshed the page.

The message disappeared.

I refreshed it again.

Still gone.

For a moment, I convinced myself that I had imagined it. Maybe the website had glitched.

Maybe the host had deleted the message before I could read the rest.

But my wife had seen it too.

She was standing behind me, staring at the phone in my hand.

“Tell me you saw that,” she whispered.

I nodded.

“I saw it.”

She sat down slowly on the edge of the bed.

Her hands were shaking.

We had already left the Airbnb and checked into a small hotel across town. We had locked the door, pulled the curtains shut, and placed our luggage against the wall as if any of those things could somehow protect us.

Neither of us had slept.

The camera was still in a small plastic evidence bag on the table.

I had taken photographs of it before leaving the Airbnb.

The tiny black lens.

The wires.

The modified smoke detector.

And suddenly, I had a horrible thought.

“What if there was more than one?”

My wife looked at me.

“Don’t.”

“What?”

“Don’t say that.”

But we both knew it was possible.

I opened the photographs on my phone and started zooming in on every corner of the room.

The smoke detector.

The television.

The lamp.

The air-conditioning unit.

The wall outlet.

The clock.

The framed picture above the bed.

Everything suddenly looked suspicious.

Everything looked like it could be hiding something.

Then my wife noticed something.

“Wait.”

She pointed at the photograph.

“Go back.”

I zoomed in.

“What?”

“The smoke detector.”

I enlarged the image.

There, near the edge of the ceiling, was something I hadn’t noticed before.

A second blinking light.

Not on the smoke detector.

On the opposite side of the room.

My stomach tightened.

“That can’t be…”

We immediately contacted the police.

They arrived about twenty minutes later.

We showed them the camera, the photographs, and the screenshots of the host’s message.

One officer took the camera carefully while another examined our photos.

“Where exactly did you find this?”

I explained everything.

The blinking light.

The chair.

The screws.

The hidden camera.

The review.

The message.

The officer frowned when he heard the last part.

“Did you save a screenshot?”

“Yes.”

I showed him.

He stared at it for several seconds.

Then he looked at his partner.

Neither said anything.

“What?” I asked.

The officer finally spoke.

“This host has been reported before.”

My wife froze.

“Reported for what?”

The officer hesitated.

“Hidden cameras.”

The room suddenly felt smaller.

“How many times?”

He didn’t answer immediately.

Instead, he asked for the address of the Airbnb.

I gave it to him.

He wrote it down.

Then he looked at us.

“You need to understand something. Finding one camera doesn’t necessarily mean there was only one.”

My wife covered her mouth.

I felt a cold wave move through my chest.

“Are you saying we were being watched the entire time?”

“We don’t know yet.”

The officer stood.

“But we’re going to find out.”

They left with the camera.

For the first time since we had discovered it, I felt a little relief.

Maybe this was finally ending.

I was wrong.

At 2:13 in the morning, my phone vibrated.

Unknown number.

I almost ignored it.

Then another message arrived.

UNKNOWN:
You shouldn’t have posted the review.

My heart began pounding.

My wife sat up.

“What is it?”

I showed her.

A second message appeared.

UNKNOWN:
You were supposed to leave quietly.

Then a third.

UNKNOWN:
Now people are going to start asking questions.

I typed:

Who is this?

The typing indicator appeared immediately.

Three dots.

Then disappeared.

Three dots again.

Then the reply came.

UNKNOWN:
You already know.

I stared at the screen.

“No,” I whispered.

My wife shook her head.

“Don’t reply.”

But another message arrived.

This time, there was a photograph.

I opened it.

And my blood ran cold.

It was a picture of us.

Not from the Airbnb.

Not from the camera.

It had been taken outside the hotel.

We were standing beside our rental car.

The photograph had been taken from across the street.

Someone had been watching us.

My wife started crying.

I immediately called the police.

But before they answered, another photograph arrived.

This one was taken through the hotel window.

Our room.

Our curtains.

Our silhouettes.

And underneath it was a single sentence:

“You still haven’t found the second one.”

I dropped the phone.

My wife looked at me.

Neither of us spoke.

Then, somewhere inside the hotel room, we heard a faint sound.

A tiny electronic beep.

Once.

Then silence.

Beep.

My wife grabbed my arm.

“Did you hear that?”

I nodded.

We stood completely still.

The sound came again.

This time, from the ceiling.

I slowly looked up.

There was a smoke detector above the bed.

My wife started shaking her head.

“No…”

I grabbed a chair.

“Don’t.”

She whispered.

“Please don’t.”

But I had to know.

I climbed onto the chair.

My hands trembled as I reached for the detector.

I twisted it.

It came loose.

For a few seconds, I couldn’t breathe.

There was nothing inside.

Just wires.

I almost laughed from relief.

Then I noticed something.

A small black mark on the ceiling.

I touched it.

The mark moved.

It wasn’t a mark.

It was the edge of a tiny camera lens.

My legs nearly gave out.

I climbed down and called the police again.

But before they arrived, something even stranger happened.

The camera wasn’t connected to the hotel.

It was connected to my phone.

I watched in horror as a notification appeared on my screen.

New device connected.

Then another.

Camera access enabled.

My wife stared at me.

“How is that possible?”

I didn’t know.

Then I remembered something.

The Airbnb host had asked us to connect to the property’s Wi-Fi when we checked in.

My wife looked at me.

“The Wi-Fi…”

We both understood at the same time.

The cameras might not have been recording locally.

They could have been streaming.

And if the host had access to the network…

They might have been watching us even after we left.

I grabbed my laptop and checked the network history.

There were several unknown devices.

One of them had connected just minutes earlier.

I clicked on it.

A folder opened.

Inside were dozens of video files.

My heart stopped.

The files had dates.

Different dates.

Different guests.

Different rooms.

Different people.

This wasn’t about us.

We hadn’t discovered a camera.

We had discovered a system.

A system that had been watching strangers for months.

Maybe years.

I opened the oldest file.

A woman walked into the Airbnb.

She placed her suitcase on the bed.

Then she looked directly at the camera.

She smiled.

The video stopped.

I opened another.

A couple arguing.

Another.

A family eating dinner.

Another.

Someone sleeping.

I closed the laptop.

I couldn’t watch anymore.

My wife was crying silently.

Then we heard footsteps outside our hotel room.

Slow.

Heavy.

They stopped directly outside our door.

We looked at each other.

Neither of us moved.

A shadow appeared beneath the door.

Someone was standing there.

My phone vibrated again.

Another message.

UNKNOWN:
Don’t open the door.

I stared at it.

Then another message arrived.

UNKNOWN:
I’m trying to help you.

My heart pounded.

Who was this?

Before I could respond, someone knocked.

Three times.

Slowly.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

My wife whispered:

“Who is it?”

A man’s voice answered from the hallway.

“Police.”

I moved toward the door.

Then my phone vibrated one more time.

The message said:

“That’s not the police.”

I froze.

The person outside knocked again.

“Sir, open the door.”

I looked through the peephole.

And what I saw made my entire body go cold.

The man standing outside was wearing a police uniform.

But he wasn’t alone.

Behind him stood the Airbnb host.

The same man whose message had vanished from my screen.

He looked directly at the peephole.

And smiled.

Then he slowly raised one finger to his lips.

As if telling me to be quiet.

My wife grabbed my hand.

And at that exact moment, someone behind us whispered:

“Don’t move.”

We turned around.

A woman was standing inside our hotel room.

She was holding a phone.

And on her screen was a live video feed of the hallway outside our door.

She looked at us and whispered:

“They found you.”

I couldn’t speak.

“Who are you?” my wife finally asked.

The woman looked toward the door.

Then back at us.

“My name is Sarah.”

She swallowed hard.

“And I was one of the guests who disappeared after reporting the cameras.”

The knocking stopped.

The hallway went silent.

Sarah looked at me with tears in her eyes.

“Now you need to listen carefully.”

She stepped closer.

“Because the camera you found at the Airbnb…”

She paused.

“That wasn’t meant to watch the guests.”

I stared at her.

“Then who was it meant to watch?”

Sarah looked toward the ceiling.

“You.”

My wife shook her head.

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

Sarah slowly turned her phone toward us.

On the screen was a photograph.

It was our house.

Our actual house.

Taken three days before we had even arrived at the Airbnb.

My stomach dropped.

Sarah whispered:

“They didn’t start watching you at the Airbnb.”

“They’ve been watching you for weeks.”

And then the lights in our hotel room went out.

In the darkness, we heard the door handle begin to turn.