Lahat ng Kabanata ng Trapped In My Husband’s Golden Cage : Kabanata 91 - Kabanata 100

MICHAEL'S POV"You should eat."Sarah looked at her plate and picked up her fork without arguing. We were at the dining table, and the food had been sitting in front of her, untouched, for several minutes. She ate slowly, and I watched her across the table and said nothing.She had been different since the hatch. Not closed off but quieter in the particular way of a woman who has arrived at something and is living inside it before she says it out loud. All afternoon, I had been trying to read the difference, and I had not been able to name it.We walked back to the room after dinner.She sat on her bed and pulled out the notebook. I took the chair. She opened it and began writing, and I looked at the wall and tried to think about something other than what had happened earlier. The chemical at our waist. The dead end solid under my palm. My hands on her face in the dark before I had decided anything. My forehead against hers.I had been afraid of her dying.She shifted on the bed, tuc

SARAH'S POV"Sit down and face your partner."The room was small. One table with two chairs. One red button between them, and nothing else.Michael sat across from me and looked at the button and then at me.I read the rules on the wall screen. One person presses it. Two of their lives transfer to the partner. If neither presses within twenty minutes, both lose three lives. If both press simultaneously, nothing happens, and the clock resets.Simple but brutal. Designed to make one person give themselves up for the other.I looked at Michael.He looked at me.I had already decided I was going to press it. I could see from his face that he had already decided the same thing. The particular stillness he wore when a decision was finished. Settled and done."Do not," I said."Sarah.""You have more lives. It makes more sense for me to press.""It makes more sense for neither of us to press," he answered. "We do it simultaneously.""That is nearly impossible to coordinate."He looked at me

SARAH'S POV"I will not run from it."His words were still in the room at midnight.The words were still hanging there at one in the morning, still there at two. Michael's breathing beside me had been slow and even for an hour, and I had been lying on my back looking at the ceiling, and my brain had not slowed down once.I cataloged everything.Claudia's deadline first. It sat at the front of everything like a door I could not stop looking at. Close, closer than I had been allowing myself to count. She had given me an assignment, a condition, and a threat, and I had accepted all three, and the clock had been running since that office, and it was nearly out.The notebook was under the mattress. The sentence pressed flat beneath me. Thirteen words I had written without permission and could not unwrite.And Michael beside me, his arm warm on mine. His breathing, slow and present. I thought about everything he had done.He went back into a burning building for my parents. He had carried

MICHAEL'S POV"Sit down," I said.Sarah sat on the edge of the bed and watched me. I was already moving, thinking faster than I had thought since the day I walked into this building, and the thinking felt clean and certain the way it always did when a problem finally had its full shape.Claudia Hart.I had believed she was dead. A blade in a prison cell between the four AM and the five AM bed check, clean and professional. I had believed it because the report was credible and because I had underestimated her, and I was not going to make that mistake twice."The building," I pressed further. "Tell me everything she told you about how she runs it.""She said she took Khalid's network intact," Sarah answered. "His guards, his systems, his game architecture. In fact, everything.""But she does not understand it the way he did. Khalid spent years building this place from the foundation. He knew every person in it and why they were loyal and what that loyalty cost. Claudia walked in and inh

DAVINA'S POV"Still not answering."I muttered it into the phone in my hand and set it face down on the table. Michael had not answered for weeks. Not even a missed call or at least a message. I knew exactly what was happening. I picked up the notebook from under my pillow. The first entries were from the day my memory came back and I lay in the hospital bed and made the decision before I opened my eyes. I read them now the way I read them every few days, to remind myself of the shape of what I was building and why.Michael's calls: The names he used. The instructions he gave to people while I lay with my eyes closed and my breathing even and my hand slack in his because he thought I was asleep.Khalid: The Trial House. Sarah Henderson. A holding location for people he needed to manage. A legal structure that would transfer assets the moment a specific set of conditions were met.Me: my value as a controlled asset. The plan to use the baby against me.I read the last entry.The cal