Semua Bab Trapped In My Husband’s Golden Cage : Bab 61 - Bab 70

SARAH’S POVThe hall did not erupt; the shift was only quieter and more dangerous, with heads turning, eyes recalibrating, and small conversations stopping and starting again with a different subject. Four hundred people doing the same arithmetic simultaneously and arriving at the same answer.We were worth more dead than alive."Move," Tom said. "Now, don't run."Tom led us through the hall like a shepherd, without making it seem like we were going anywhere specific. We reached the east wall… a structural pillar, wide and solid, sat at the junction of two camera angles that Tom had apparently spent three months identifying."Here," he said. "They cancel each other out, and nothing we do in this space gets recorded."We pressed in tight. Five people in a dead zone while four hundred calculated our worth around us."How long do we have?" Garrett asked. His leg was freshly wrapped with a strip torn from Tom's shirt. The blood had slowed, but his colour was still wrong."Until the game h

MICHAEL'S POV"Stay."Davina's voice was soft like dew. And before I knew it, her hand found my arm in the pale morning light filtering through the suite's curtains, not demanding or performing any drama. Simply warm, and I'd noticed this was the same way she had been every morning for the past three weeks without variation or agenda."I have calls," I responded."You always have calls.” She sat up, the sheet pooling around her. She looked at me with those clear, trusting eyes that had been looking at me the same way since she woke up in that hospital bed. She found a stranger holding her hand and decided he was someone she could trust. "Five minutes, I repeat, just five."I sat back down.The thing about Davina is that she never pushed, demanded, manipulated, or positioned herself for an angle.She existed in whatever space I gave her and made that space feel like something it had no business feeling like.Peace. That was the word that kept arriving uninvited. Three weeks of this wo

SARAH'S POV"Time."The single word came through the speakers while the doors unlocked simultaneously—a mechanical sound, clean and final, like a verdict being delivered.I pushed my door open and stepped into the corridor, dripping from head to foot.Game Two had been a flooding chamber with a combination lock built into the ceiling. You had to tread water long enough to reach it, hold your breath long enough to work the combination, and solve a sequence that changed every thirty seconds. After three failed attempts, the drain was permanently sealed. I got it on the second try, with water at my chin and my lungs screaming.I stood in the corridor and breathed.Alvin came out of his door two seconds after me. He was wet too, his black jumpsuit clinging, his jaw set in a way that said he had just survived a risky exercise and wasn't going to say anything about it. His eyes found me immediately and moved across my face in a quick, assessing sweep before he looked away.Not a long look,

CONTROLLER'S POV"Four hundred are still breathing."I muttered to myself, I was my own audience, just me, the screens and the numbers, the way it always was up here. I preferred it that way; people introduced variables while screens only showed the truth.I leaned back in my chair and looked at the wall of monitors in front of me. Twenty-four feeds covering every corridor, every game chamber, every inch of the main hall. Four hundred players moving through the building like cells through a bloodstream, forming clusters, breaking apart, reforming. It was beautiful to watch from this distance. I had been watching it for four years, and it never stopped being beautiful.My name before this room was Khalid. Khalid Van Leer. Son of Marcus Van Leer, brother of Michael Van Leer, I died at twelve years old, according to every document that mattered. My father had been thorough as always with the death certificate, the funeral records, the gravestone in the family plot that I had never visit

GARRETT'S POV"Keep up, or we both die. Simple."The man on the other end of my chain uttered without looking at me. He was already moving, pulling the chain taut between our wrists, forcing me to match his pace or get dragged.His name was Dex, and that was all I had. The screen had shown it beside my name when the pairings appeared, and now we were chained together in a concrete maze three floors deep with walls that were actively closing, and he had decided in the first thirty seconds that I was a liability.He was not entirely wrong.My leg was bad. It was bad since Game One when the bullet went in, and Game Two had not improved it, and the walk from the game chambers to the hall and back had cost me something I could feel but could not quantify until I was asked to run. Now I was being asked to run, and the leg was clearly and loudly communicating its opinion with every step."Left," Dex said."The path on the right is wider.""Wider means more players, and more players means con