Lahat ng Kabanata ng Trapped In My Husband’s Golden Cage : Kabanata 141 - Kabanata 150

SARAH'S POV"Whatever is happening between all of us can wait."I stood in the middle of the main room, everyone was assembled. I looked at each face in turn. Tom on the couch. Viktor by the door. Alvin in the chair. Garrett near the window, not looking at me. Michael standing to my left, arms crossed, watching the room."Clara cannot wait," I continued. "She is inside the operation right now. She is running assignments right now. Every day she stays in there is another day she is being used by a man who recruited her because of who she is to us." I looked at Tom. "Tell them everything."Tom sat forward. He set his coffee down, folded his hands together, looked at the room with the expression he wore when he was about to deliver something he had been sitting with for too long."Clara currently oversees the management layer between Rael's thirty hidden assets, the ones beneath the sixty winners, and Rael himself," Tom opened. "She does not know the full scope of what she manages. She t

ALVIN'S POV"If Sarah becomes a problem, I'll handle her myself."The words were still sitting in my chest, cold, flat, like water during harmattan. Then I pressed my back against the wall beside the window, breathing through my nose, keeping my body still while my brain ran the sentence again.Michael had said it without heat. Without drama. The way you state a contingency you have already thought through and filed away for later use.I pressed closer to the glass, trying to catch more. Fragments came through."Clara.""The network.""Leverage.""Sarah."Her name again... Twice in under five minutes. I watched Rael's mouth form it, watched Michael's face absorb it with controlled stillness.Movement to my left.A figure, security, moving along the far wall of the building with the deliberate pace of someone making rounds rather than responding to something. Still enough time.I pushed off the wall, moved back the way I came, keeping my steps even, my pace unremarkable, the walk of so

SARAH'S POVMichael looked at me across the safe house main room, the space between us carrying every person who had watched Alvin deliver that sentence thirty seconds ago. Viktor near the door. Tom at the table. Garrett by the wall. Alvin standing exactly where he had planted himself, watching Michael with the particular patience of someone who had already decided what they thought."Explain it," I pressed. "Tell me what survival logic looks like when you threaten my life.""I was testing Rael," Michael replied, level, unhurried. "If I reacted emotionally, I confirmed that my connection to you was a liability he could use against me." He held my gaze. "If I stayed calm, I stayed inside the information flow. I kept access to everything he was about to tell me.""So my safety is a calculation? Oh, wow!""Everyone's safety is a calculation in this situation," he replied. "That is not a preference. That is the reality of what we are inside.""And who made you the person who gets to calcul

SARAH'S POVThe common area had become exactly what safe houses were never supposed to become, a room where people sat in the same space while trusting each other less with every passing minute. Viktor at the table, running diagnostics that kept returning the same clean result. Tom beside him, reading through Clara's file for the fourth time. Alvin near the window. Michael standing at the far wall looking at his phone, then putting it down, then picking it up again.Garrett was the only one not in the room. He had been gone for ten minutes. Nobody had acknowledged it.I pushed my chair back, stood, moved toward the stairs without explaining myself. Nobody asked where I was going. That was the thing about a room where trust had cracked, everyone gave everyone else a wide berth, because narrowing the distance required conversation, conversation required honesty, honesty required things nobody was ready to spend.I sat on the top step of the landing, back against the wall, knees up, loo

SARAH'S POV"Come on, sleep."The ceiling didn't cooperate. Neither did the pillow, the blanket, the dark, the quiet. I had been lying in the same position for forty minutes watching the room stay exactly as it was while my brain refused to slow down.I pushed the covers back, swung my legs over the edge, and stood.The safe house at two in the morning was the particular quiet of a place holding its breath. I moved downstairs without turning on the lights, found the kitchen by memory, filled a glass, drank half of it standing at the sink looking at the dark window above it.On my way back up, the light stopped me.Tom's door was open two inches, a thin line of yellow cutting across the hallway floor. I pushed it gently, expecting to find him awake, hunched over a screen, running another trace on Clara's location.He was asleep at his desk, cheek against his forearm, breathing slow. The lamp was still on. Papers covered every surface around him, maps, photographs, printed network recor