The Truman Cage: My Husband Faked My World Chapter 07

The Truman Cage: My Husband Faked My World Chapter 07

Julian lifted the white cloth. A thin, fragile arm lay exposed. Beneath the familiar crisscross of old

scars were newer marks.

Deep crescent gouges. Angry red fading into a bruised purple, most of them still raw and weeping

clear fluid.

Ethan’s breath caught. His mind snapped back to the kitchen just hours ago. Those marks

hadn’t been there. He’d seen my arm.

they

Julian’s voice cut through the frigid air. “We ran a rapid DNA comparison – epithelial tissue from

under Sunny’s nails against the skin cells taken from the edges of these wounds.”

“It’s a complete match. Sunny did this.”

All color drained from Ethan’s face. Julian wasn’t finished. “After Clara was pronounced dead, one

of my pediatricians came forward. He was terrified, but he finally confessed what he knew.” Julian

paused, his jaw tight. “Vivian pulled him aside yesterday afternoon. She asked him a hypothetical.”

“If a small child were to fall from a low height, how should they land, and where, to make it look as

bad as possible while doing the least real damage?”

A suffocating silence descended on the cold room.

Leo was the first to speak after a long silence. His voice was thick with revulsion. “Vivian’s been

lying to us the whole time. Clara never dropped him.”

He choked on the words. “Sunny was the one hurting her she was trying to hand him back. She

must have lost her grip when he dug his nails into her wounds.”

“And Vivian planned it. She staged every bit of it.”

Leo and Julian both looked at Ethan.

Ethan took a slow breath. “Give me until tonight. I’ll tear the truth out of her.” He held both of their gazes. “If this is exactly what it looks like, I know damn well none of us is going to let this go.”

“I won’t either.”

He walked out of the morgue, and his steps faltered.

Across the manor, Vivian was basking in her triumph.

She had only meant to use Sunny to inflict a little pain. She hadn’t expected it to work quite this flawlessly. The bitch had already been hanging by a thread a little push, and she had simply.

snapped.

Well. That had worked out nicely.

The only person who could threaten her place was gone. Ethan might rage for a while, but once the anger burned off and there was no solid evidence, where else was he going to go? He’d come back.

He always came back. Time had a way of smoothing everything over.

The dead never beat the living.

She could already picture it – herself as Mrs. Thorne, settled and untouchable, Ethan’s attention

all hers, and Sunny growing up to inherit everything.

Even the pudding on the table tasted better than usual. She closed her eyes and drifted off.

She didn’t know how long she slept. When she woke, the first thing she noticed was the smell

something ripe and animal, like manure.

She opened her eyes to a low ceiling of rough, dark timber. What covered her wasn’t silk but a ragged quilt so grimy she couldn’t guess its original color.

And what she wore wasn’t silk pajamas but a shapeless rough–cloth dress that scratched at her skin

with every breath.

Where was she? Vivian’s heart slammed against her ribs, and cold spread through her body.

She scrambled off the bed, lunged for the door and yanked it open it gave with a long creak and outside was not her hallway but a rough, mud–tracked courtyard that looked like it belonged to another century entirely,

Was she trapped in the fake past now, too?