Chapter 2 - The Golden Mask
For twenty-six days, Marcus played the grieving, devoted husband upstairs while running a chamber of psychological torture downstairs. Every afternoon, his mother, Beatrice, descended the wooden stairs in her tailored emerald dresses and pearl necklaces, watching me with venomous satisfaction.
"You were always too proud, Clara," Beatrice sneered, leaning against the storage shelves while tapping the steel mesh with her manicured nails. "You thought just because your father built Sterling Enterprises, you were royalty. Marcus should have owned that company years ago."
Beside Beatrice stood Marcus’s younger brother, Brett, a reckless gambler whose debts were being quietly wiped out by the money Marcus stole from my family trust. Brett leaned over the cage, yelling at me, his eyes bloodshot with adrenaline: "Just hurry up and deliver the kid so we can end this farce!"
I never gave them the satisfaction of begging. Every drop of water, every moldy crust of bread they tossed through the feeding slot, I consumed with ferocious determination.
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They thought I was helpless. But they didn't know that on the day Marcus first dragged me down here, I had managed to drop my father's old antique silver fountain pen into the drainpipe directly beneath the sump pump. The pen had a hollow screw cap that blocked the valve, slowly causing the main water line pressure in the house to destabilize.
Upstairs, the plumbing was failing. And today, Marcus was forced to call in private contractors to inspect the main line.
