All Chapters of A Prison Called Love Taboo: Chapter 201 - Chapter 210

SELENAI started doing the mornings like a woman who had given up.That was the point.Kael came out of the study at 6:40, eyes hard from another night of company fire, and found coffee already poured, Sienna’s bag packed, my mouth soft enough not to invite a fight. He paused in the kitchen doorway as if the absence of resistance itself were suspicious.“You’re up early,” he said.“She has assembly.”He waited for more. I buttered toast. Sienna padded in, climbed into her chair, and announced that Dragon had slept badly because adults were “doing silent wars again.” I kissed her head. Kael’s gaze stayed on me one second longer than necessary. I let him see nothing but tired cooperation.At the gate I counted.One car ahead. One behind. The same man on the left always checked his phone when we hit the school traffic choke point. Not long. Four seconds. Five on a crowded day. The other one watched Sienna more than me, because Kael’s orders were about the child first. I filed both facts

KAEL She was already in the kitchen when I came down.Coffee. Sienna’s bag. The quiet face she wore after nights when the fight went physical in one direction and sexual in the other. I knew this version. I had been married to its cycle long enough: she pushed, I shut the door, the house strained, then she came back into my hands and the temperature dropped for a few days.Last night fit the pattern.Too well, maybe. But patterns existed because they repeated.“Morning,” she said.I watched her mouth when she said it. Soft. No edge. The same mouth that had told me to leave the phone, that had said Daddy like she needed it. My body reacted once, low and brief, and then the rest of the day moved in and took the space.“Assembly,” Sienna announced. “Dragon stays home. School says no reptiles.”I kissed the top of her head. Selena fixed a button on the child’s sleeve without asking me for anything. No museum request. No job talk. No speech about oxygen. After three weeks of company fire

SELENA His eyes found the gap.For one frozen second we stared at each other through the crates; me with Sienna crushed to my chest, him with his radio still lifted and the alley light cutting a pale line across his cheek. Recognition landed in his face like a switch.“Visual…” he began.I kicked the nearest crate outward with my good foot.Wood scraped concrete. A stack of empty bottles tied at the neck went over in a hard, cheap crash. The sound filled the alley. The guard flinched sideways from the spill, not far, just enough. I was already up, ankle screaming, Sienna a dead weight of panic in my arms.“Mrs. Carter… stop!”I ran. A staggered, ugly flight down the alley with my daughter half-carried, half-dragged, her voice breaking into sobs against my neck. “Mummy…. Mummy he’s coming… please…”“Don’t look. Don’t look.”We burst out of the alley mouth into a denser street, the kind with evening shop lights and bodies moving in every direction. I shouldered through a knot of peopl

SELENA The footsteps outside stopped so long I thought the person was listening for a child’s breathing.Then a woman’s voice, tired and local, said to someone farther down the hall, “That’s the back room. Couple checked in late. Don’t start with that one unless you’re paying for the disturbance.”A man answered; not a guard voice exactly, more like the boarding-house night manager being leaned on. “They’re asking about a woman and a little girl.”“At this hour everybody becomes a woman and a little girl,” the woman said. “I didn’t see faces. Cash guests. That’s all I know.”Silence. A radio hissed once through the wall. The man said, quieter, “If you’re wrong…”“Then you can fire me in the morning.”The footsteps moved on.I stayed on the floor with my hand on Sienna’s back until the corridor became ordinary again. My ankle pulsed inside the brace. Sienna slept through the whole exchange like her body had finally chosen unconsciousness over terror. I did not.Pity, it turned out, co

SELENA The first sign was the shopkeeper’s face.In the morning she had taken our cash for the back room with a kind of flat mercy. By early afternoon her eyes kept going to the street door and then away from me, as if looking too long might leave a mark. When I asked to stay until evening, she shook her head before I finished the sentence.“Not tonight,” she said. “Men asked at the corner. Not police. The other kind.”My stomach dropped. “What did you tell them?”“That rooms behind shops are for storage.” She pushed a small paper bag into my hand, two boiled eggs, a piece of bread, and closed my fingers around it like a transaction she wanted finished. “Take the side alley to the main road. Don’t come back.”Sienna watched this from the cot with Dragon in her arms. “Are the black-car people close?”“Yes,” I said. There was no point lying to a child who had already lived through alleys and sweeps. “So we move.”“Again?”“Again.”Outside, the residential belt looked ordinary in hard d