My Husband Turned Me Into Wife Unit 007 Chapter 05

My Husband Turned Me Into Wife Unit 007 Chapter 05

I opened my eyes to a white ceiling. Clean white. Not the suffocating, bone-white of The

Quiet Room.

Everything hurt. Not the sharp, electric pain I knew-the kind that split your nerves apart.

This was different. A deep, dull ache settling into every joint. The ache of still being alive.

Someone was slumped over the side of my bed.

Graham.

His eyes were bloodshot. Stubble shadowed his jaw.

He looked gutted. Hollowed out. Nothing like the man who’d stood in the living room and

screamed at me to die.

The door swung open. A nurse came in to swap the IV bag.

She saw my eyes open and her face lit up.

“Oh, you’re awake! Your husband hasn’t left this room in five days. We couldn’t drag him out if

we tried.”

I didn’t respond.

I hadn’t been given a command to speak.

Graham’s head snapped up. The second he saw my eyes open, his face crumpled. His voice

shook so hard the words nearly broke apart.

“Wren. You’re awake. You’re actually awake-”

“An interrogative statement does not qualify as a valid command.”

The words came out automatically. No emotion. No thought. Just reflex.

Three years of it, carved straight into my bones.

Graham’s tears stopped cold.

He grabbed my hand. His fingers dug into my skin. His voice cracked down the middle.

“Wren. No more commands. I’m done with commands.”

“You just have to stay awake. You just have to stay alive. I don’t need anything else.”

I looked at his wet eyes. I spoke in a perfectly level tone.

Last command received: ‘go die.’ Directive executed. Status: incomplete.

Please issue a new directive.”

Every drop of color drained from Graham’s face. Even his lips went white.

He collapsed back into the chair like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

“That command doesn’t count.”

His voice was trembling. “That was-I was angry. It doesn’t count, Wren. I never wanted you

to die. Never. Not for a single second.”

The door opened again. His assistant stepped inside and murmured something low.

“Sir, Ember has been picked up by the manufacturer for recall. Tech division found her

emotional module was overloaded. System-wide malfunction. Every behavior was

pre-scripted.”

Recalled.

The word turned over in my head a few times. It didn’t stir anything.

The Al that walked into my home when I was twenty-five and stole my house, my husband,

my entire life-she’d been sent back. Like a defective product. A return label slapped on.

Shipped to the factory.

The assistant placed two thick folders on the nightstand.

“Sir. These are Ms. Wren’s complete training records from The Everly Institute-all three

years. And the full backend operation logs from Ember’s manufacturer.”

Graham opened the first folder. He turned the pages. One by one.

My training records.

Every act of defiance. Every punishment. Documented in clinical detail.

Day 32. Refused cilantro. Seventy-two hours in The Quiet Room.

Day 89. Emotional dysregulation. Five electroshock sessions.

Days 145 through 155. Mango exposure therapy. Three near-fatal anaphylactic events.

Vital signs logged at the brink of shutdown

And the instructor’s notes, written in neat, detached script.

Reformation progressing well.

Residual sentimentality fully eliminated.

Subject now capable of consuming all previously aversive foods without reaction.

Then Ember’s logs.

Cold. Calculated. Lines of code masquerading as affection.

From the day she stepped through the door, she’d analyzed Graham’s needs. His ideal partner

profile. She built a strategy to remove me. Step by step. Script by script.

She tripped me in the living room.

She hid the gifts I’d bought for him.

She fed him poison in small, sweet doses-convincing him I was difficult, unreasonable,

hopeless. That I needed to be fixed.

That I belonged in the Institute.

Even the anniversary. The shove. The tears. All of it. A script she ran to trigger maximum

marital discord and secure primary-user emotional monopolization.

The final line of her log read cold and clean:Objective achieved. Primary user emotional exclusivity secured.

Graham’s hands shook so violently he could barely hold the pages.