The Truman Cage: My Husband Faked My World Chapter 10

The Truman Cage: My Husband Faked My World Chapter 10

Julian’s death was quieter. Somehow, that made it worse.

He did it to himself. He put on clean surgical scrubs, laid out his instruments, and methodically

sliced himself open.

They found notes beside him, pages of sketches and equations in his usual precise handwriting, the kind you’d expect to see pinned to a hospital corkboard. Except the content was the pure, distilled rambling of a madman.

Page after page circled back to the same obsessive idea: “The theoretical possibility of autologous blood recovery and reperfusion after prolonged clinical death.”

One line had been carved so hard the pen nearly tore through the page.

“I can still save her. She should not have died.”

The coroner and the police called it a psychotic break, a suicide brought on by extreme psychological distress.

He had turned himself into his own final test subject. He never stopped believing I was still fixable. If he could just solve the equation, he could bring me back.

He never should have gone down that road. There had been no time travel. He wasn’t the Julian

from the manor who could cure anything, he was just a man in a lab coat who had loved someone he

couldn’t save.

They were all liars. Every last one of them. And their lies had cost me my life.

And then there was Ethan.

He didn’t lose his mind. He didn’t die. What he did was worse. He forced himself to keep living.

Vivian was still on the estate, surviving in ways that barely counted as living. Leo and Julian had

found their own bloody exits. Social services had taken Sunny.

Ethan was the only one left.

At first, it was just insomnia, lying in the dark, staring at the ceiling, the same words looping through his head like a broken record.

“Didn’t you promise… that no one would hurt me here?”

Then he started doing what had been done to me, the thing that had broken me.

He cut himself. Arms, thighs, chest, one line after another, methodically, until the scars mapped his entire body. New cuts over old ones. Some barely broke the skin. Others went deep enough to show the gleaming muscle underneath.

“Not enough.” His voice was flat, clinical. “This one would have hurt her more. It needs to be

deeper.”

He adjusted the pressure, the angle of the blade, pressing harder until pain washed his vision white.

Only then did the screaming in his head finally go quiet.

It went on until there was almost no unmarked skin left. Old scars stacked in ridges, new cuts

opening in whatever gaps remained, all of it healing into something grotesque. He looked like a monster that had been taken apart and stitched back together blindly.

He ran out of skin before he ran out of grief. And somewhere in that realization, he understood: I

wasn’t coming back.

The Clara who could cry and smile and beg and be afraid–the one who, by the end, could only stare at him with nothing left in her eyes–was gone.

He had put her in that room himself. She bled out, and her body went cold. Then she was ash. Then

she was in the ground.

She was dead.

The fire began in the master bedroom of Thorne Manor. Heat rolled through the halls, and the glow

of the flames lit Ethan’s face from below, cast in demonic shadows.

He didn’t run. He didn’t call for help.

He pulled out the same knife they’d wrestled from me, the one he’d kept, and plunged it into his

own throat. Blood hit the floor as the fire climbed the walls and tore through the roof, sending a

blinding pillar of light into the night sky.

Everything burned. Everything burned clean.

That was where the novel ended. I scrolled to the bottom of the page and just sat there for a second.

Right.

I still didn’t fully understand what the countdown and that voice had actually given me. No

transformation. No superpowers. No portal to another world.

I had just woken up in my own bed. And all of that trauma was safely contained within the words of

the novel in my hands.

My name is Clara. Same as the girl in the book. I’d been messing around, curious about what Al could do, so I had it generate a custom Dark Romance novel with my name as the main character.

My life isn’t anything dramatic. I’m just an office worker. But at least nobody’s trapping me in a fake past, nobody’s breaking my legs or blinding me, and nobody’s locking me in a storeroom to

bleed out while I’m pregnant.

And I don’t have a pack of unhinged, psychopathic men orbiting my life, ruining me and calling it

love.

I took a breath, locked my phone, and decided to go get lunch. A bowl of spicy noodles with a fried

egg.

I’m a real person. I get hungry. I want things. I’m not some tragic heroine an AI can spin up from a

few lines of text.

But as I headed down the stairs, I heard something, faint, mechanical, at the very edge of my

hearing.

[An AI can write a thousand stories that hurt you, but it will never understand your pain.]

[But I am human. And when I chose to intervene and rewrite this ending, Clara, I already knew I

wanted to give you your life back.]

[Your survival reward has been delivered. Be happy.]

I frowned and leaned toward the sound, trying to catch it. But it was already gone, drowned out by

the shop owner’s voice rising over the lunch rush.

“What spice level for the noodles, miss?”

“Mild. Just a little spicy. And a fried egg, please.”

Later, for some reason I couldn’t explain, I tried to open the novel again. The page returned a 404

error. I stared at the screen for a second, but I couldn’t remember why I’d opened it in the first

place.

“Huh. What was this site again? Why did I even click on it…?”

I shrugged, putting the phone away. “Whatever. Noodles first.”