Divorced: Ex-wife Heiress Strikes Back의 모든 챕터: 챕터 191 - 챕터 200

BRUCE.The paranoia I felt seeped in through the cracks I had convinced myself were manageable and acceptable; the cracks I had told myself I would seal later, when things slowed down. The irony of it all was that they never did. I felt it settle into my bones days before I admitted it was what it was; a low, constant pressure behind my eyes. A tightening in my chest that didn’t ease even when I sat still. Sleep stopped being rest and became a shallow pause between calculations.The drone had never been the problem. That realization came quietly, almost politely, when a secondary safehouse went dark. It wasn’t the one we were using, not even the backup. It was the idea of a backup, a location we had debated for less than ten minutes, mapped, then discarded because it felt unnecessary, too exposed, and too predictable. We never went there, never ran supplies, never logged a move.And yet the feed was cut out. There had been no spike in activity, no sc

ISABELLA.Antonio didn’t threaten me, and that was the first thing that made my skin prickle, leaving me unsettled. I had been braced for it: the leverage, the raised voice, the list of everything he could take from me if I refused to cooperate. Men like him usually needed to establish dominance, to remind you who held the power. They leaned too close and they wanted fear because fear made obedience feel earned. Antonio did none of that. He didn’t move much at all. He stood slightly to the side of the room, his hands loosely folded behind his back, his posture relaxed in a way that felt deliberate, like he wasn’t guarding me, or challenging me, or even watching me that closely. Like I was a variable he had already accounted for.“Watch,” he said calmly.The screens came alive one by one, softly, like a room waking up. I expected violence, expected images meant to break me: bodies, explosions, the people I loved bleeding

CLARISSA.The room never quite settled, no matter how quiet they tried to make it. I had noticed it first in the gaps between sounds, not the noises themselves: the machines humming, the distant shuffle of shoes outside my door, the soft hiss of oxygen, but the spaces between them. They all sounded too even, too carefully spaced. Like someone had smoothed the world into something presentable and hoped I wouldn’t look too closely.Hospitals usually have chaos under order, filled with rushed movements and tensed, hurried conversations. This place didn’t feel like any of that. It felt curated, adjusted, and tuned, and that was what made my skin prickle.Before, interference had felt sharp and obvious, like cold fingerprints on warm systems. Cloak behavior. It came in the form of glitches, delays, and shadows in places that should have been empty. This was different. This wasn’t a machine leaning on the scale.This was the work of people, hands deciding and adjusting the variables, eyes w

CLARISSA.I went to see my father because I didn’t know where else to put the weight sitting in my chest.Hospitals had a way of pretending things were stable. The soft voices and bright lighting all suggested progress, even when nothing was actually moving forward. My father looked better than he had been in recent times, and color had returned to his face. The monitors beside him ticked along with mechanical optimism. If I hadn’t known what he carried inside him, what he had helped unleash, I might have believed recovery was possible.He watched me sit down without speaking. His eyes followed me the way they used to when I was a child and he was deciding whether to lecture me or let me fail on my own.“I’m tired,” he said finally.Not weak. Not groggy. Tired.“I’m tired of living like this,” he continued, his voice low. “But I can’t die yet.”The words landed with no drama, no self-pity. Just a fact.I waited for him to explain. He didn’t. And in that pause, something hollow opened

MARCUS.For most of my life, I believed systems were neutral, that if they were built carefully with good rules and values, they would reflect their creators instead of twisting them. It was a comforting lie, one I held onto for years even as proof slowly showed me otherwise.I knew the failsafe as soon as it moved. It wasn’t loud or obvious. The Cloak’s oldest systems never were—they worked quietly. They showed up as patterns: approvals happening too fast, denials going to the same people, small problems fixing themselves too perfectly. It felt familiar and personal, like seeing your own handwriting in someone else’s note.My stomach sank.I noticed it first in the Montclair quarterly reports: a supply change that should have been flagged, a regulation clearing too easily, a competitor’s stock falling at the worst possible time. On their own, they meant nothing. Together, they felt familiar—like a pattern from the early days.Since before the Cloak had a name.Mr. Anthonio, or Antoni