Lahat ng Kabanata ng Trapped In My Husband’s Golden Cage : Kabanata 81 - Kabanata 90

SARAH'S POV"I went back in for your parents."I was sitting on the edge of the bed in our shared room, and those words were still in the air around me like smoke that had not finished settling. Michael had whispered them in my ears forty minutes ago in the corridor, and then we had walked back to the room in silence, and he had sat on his bed and picked up a water bottle and drunk from it like he had not just handed me something that dismantled twenty years of a story I had been living inside.He was still sitting there now, across the room. Not watching me or performing anything. Just present.I stood up."I need an hour," I said.He looked up."Alone," I said. "I just need an hour."He nodded once. No questions, no negotiation. He stood, picked up his jacket, and walked out of the room, pulling the door shut quietly behind him.I sat back down.The file I had been keeping on Michael Van Leer in my head since the recovered memories in Patricia's lab had one entry that never moved, n

GARRETT'S POV"Turn it off."Nobody moved to turn it off.The screen on the wall of the holding room had been running continuously since the second day. Game footage, hall footage, and corridor footage. Claudia's people had set it up and left it running, whether as entertainment or torture, neither Tom nor Alvin had decided. I had decided it was torture. I watched it anyway.Tom was on the floor with his back against the bed, his bandaged leg stretched out, reading something he had found in the drawer when we arrived. Alvin was on the far bed facing the ceiling. He had been facing the ceiling for most of the morning.The screen showed the glass bridge game from two days ago. Sarah and Michael, crossing panel by panel. Their timing and the way they moved around each other without collision.I watched it and said nothing."You have been sitting in that chair for four hours," Tom said without looking up from what he was reading."I know.""You have not eaten.""I’m not hungry."Tom looke

ALVIN'S POV"She is losing herself."Tom looked up from the floor, where he had been doing slow, careful stretches for his leg. He looked at me. Then on the screen, then back at me."I know," he said."You know, and you are doing nothing.""I am doing what is available to me from inside a locked room," he said. "Which is the same as the nothing you are doing."I looked at the screen.The footage was from the dining room. Tonight's dinner with Sarah and Michael is at the small table with the soft light between them. I had watched this footage for six days, and I knew the difference between what I was seeing now and what I had seen on day one.Day one had been two people performing proximity for separate reasons. Careful and measured. Both of them are running a strategy while pretending not to.This was not that anymore."Look at her face," I said.Tom looked at the screen."That is not the face of someone running Claudia's plan," I said. "That is Sarah. The real one. The one that only

SARAH'S POVMichael's breathing across the room was slow and even. He was asleep. I had been listening to it for two hours.I turned onto my back and looked up.The ceiling of the Trial House holding room was concrete, like everything else in this building, and it offered nothing, and that was exactly what I needed right now. No information, no calculation. Just a surface to look at while I did what I did at three in the morning when everything I had been managing during the day ran out of road.I was not performing anymore.That was the first thing.I lay with it and made myself look at it directly without softening it. Four days ago, I had been executing a plan. I had been deliberate and measured and treated the proximity to Michael as a tool, something to apply carefully in a specific direction for a specific outcome. I had been the person making the plan happen.I was not that person anymore.I did not know when exactly the shift had occurred. The bridge, maybe. The dark navigatio

SARAH'S POV"Up, now. Both of you."The guard's voice came through the door speaker at five in the morning, and I was sitting up before I was fully awake, the specific reflex the Trial House had built into me over weeks of games that started without warning and punished slowness.Michael was already on his feet.He looked at me across the dim room. "Early.""Yes," I said."That is not standard.""No," I said. "It’s not."We dressed without speaking and reported to the game gate with the other pairs, all of us half-awake and reading the room for what was coming. The hall had the particular tension of people who had learned that early games were usually worse than scheduled ones. Claudia liked the element of biological disadvantage. A body that had been asleep twenty minutes ago did not perform the same as a body that had been given time to prepare.The screen above the gate lit up.Carousel. Read Carefully.The rules appeared in white text. Circular track. Pairs run together. Every six