The Truman Cage: My Husband Faked My World Chapter 09

The Truman Cage: My Husband Faked My World Chapter 09

Vivian screamed, raw, animal sounds ricocheting off the stone walls. One of the overseers spat on the floor and muttered under her breath.

“Shut her up.”

She yanked a wad of filthy cloth from her apron pocket, sour–smelling and reeking, and shoved it

into Vivian’s mouth.

Vivian gagged, the sound choking off in her throat. The stench flooded her sinuses, so thick she

could taste it, and black crowded the edges of her vision.

But they still weren’t done.

The two overseers exchanged a look. Then the beating started, fists and boots, no rhythm to it, just

blows falling wherever they landed.

After that day, Vivian might as well have ceased to exist. There was only a wretched new thing on

the estate now, blind, crippled, half–mad, dragging itself through chamber pots and latrines for the

whole manor.

No one could say for sure how she lost her sight. Maybe she’d stumbled into the sharp corner of a

table. Maybe boiling water had splashed into her eyes during punishment.

No one could explain what happened to her legs either. Maybe she’d slipped on the stairs. Maybe something heavy had come down on her knees.

What everyone knew was this: by the time Vivian resurfaced, she was blind. Her eyes stayed open, fixed on nothing.

Both legs bent at angles that made people turn away, useless under her, and she dragged herself

over the cold, wet stone on her forearms. They dressed her in rags so thin and foul they barely counted as clothing.

Black grime was packed under her fingernails for good. Her hair had turned into greasy ropes, and lice crawled through it freely. She scrubbed the latrine floors and drainage trenches with a broken brush, with half its bristles gone, over and over.

The smallest mistake, a streak left behind, a moment too slow, earned her a beating.

“Scrub harder, you worthless slut.”

“Get away from there – don’t you dare drag your filth across my clean floor.”

“What are you staring at? You can’t even see, you ugly freak.”

Fists, kicks, wooden switches, and whatever insult came to mind, that was just a normal day.

Vivian lost her mind. Or maybe she’d already lost it, and this was just what was left. She scrubbed

and muttered, scrubbed and muttered, the words tumbling out in a singsong loop no one bothered

to listen to.

“Go back. I have to go back. The real world – I have to get back to the real world…”

“Ethan

Ethan, please, take me back. This isn’t real. None of this is real…”

“I came here, so I can go back. I just have to find a way. There has to be a way…”

Then a basin of gray water would crash over her head, or a stick would crack across her spine, and

the muttering would stop for a while.

Every so often, planes crossed the sky above the manor. Vivian couldn’t see them. She couldn’t see

anything.

She was never going back.

But Vivian wasn’t the only one who broke.

Leo died the day they buried me.

The cemetery was silent, that held–breath silence that settles over a burial just before the urn went into the ground. Leo hadn’t made a sound through the entire service.

Then he moved.

He shoved past the person in front of him and lunged for the open grave, his fingers clawing into the dirt, tearing at it like he could still reach me if he dug deep enough.

“Clara, don’t –” His voice cracked open. “Don’t bury her. You can’t

ground!”

you can’t put her in the

He was screaming, his face contorted in absolute agony, past the point of caring what he looked

like. All he could see was that small urn.

“Give her back. Give her back to me!”

Two bodyguards grabbed him from behind, locking his arms and hauling him back from the edge. In the middle of the struggle, Leo lifted his head and looked at my headstone. His voice dropped to something barely above a whisper.

“I can’t do this anymore, Clara.” He swallowed. “Every night I dream about you. You’re standing by my bed, covered in blood.”

“You look at me with your ruined eye and you say, ‘Leo, why didn’t you save me?‘ And I never have

an answer.”

Leo tried to smile. It looked worse than crying.

“Yeah. Why didn’t I save you?” He was talking to the stone now, to me, to no one at all. “I could have seen it sooner. I could have stopped them – I could have stopped all of it. And I didn’t do a thing.”

“I just stood there and watched you die.”

His voice dropped to almost nothing, just breath shaped into words.

་་་་་་་་

Then he wrenched free. He lunged forward, driving his skull violently into the granite of my headstone.

Blood splattered across the engraved stone. Leo’s body slid down the face of it, and with the last of his strength, he spoke.

“Clara. I’m coming to find you.”