His Housewife Had Secret Identities novel Chapter 472

Everyone froze in shock. Then Jonathan’s voice rang out, suddenly changing his orders.

“No—move these containers aside, now! Hurry!”

The thunderstorm only grew fiercer. The sky darkened so quickly it seemed as if daylight might never return.

Niamh had always been afraid of the dark. She hated the sound of doors slamming shut—even the slightest bang could leave her trembling from head to toe.

At thirteen, she’d been branded with the charge of “assault” and sent straight to Aldenville Juvenile Rehabilitation Center—no trial, no questions asked.

Within her first week at Aldenville, she mouthed off to an instructor and got thrown into solitary.

Solitary was nothing like the other classrooms. It wasn’t even in the same building.

To this day, Niamh remembered the cell: a cramped, triangular closet of a room, with a single vent you couldn’t even reach your hand through.

A bulb dangled from the ceiling, but it had never worked. The walls were streaked with peeling paint and patches of mold. There were stains of god-knows-what—vomit or worse.

There was nowhere to rest in that cell. Forget a bed—even a stool was too much to hope for. A plastic bucket in the corner served as a toilet.

It was the dead of winter, and the room had no heat. Niamh curled up as tightly as she could, her hands and feet numb from the cold.

But the cold wasn’t the worst of it.

Hours—maybe days—passed in pitch blackness, the air thick and unmoving. She could hear nothing but her own frantic heartbeat, pounding like a drum in her ears. Nausea and dizziness rolled over her in waves, and more than once she thought she might be sick.

Time lost all meaning. She couldn’t tell day from night. Trapped in that coffin-sized cell, Niamh sometimes wondered if she was already dead—dead and buried, and the only thing left was the faint echo of her own mind.

Maybe thinking was all she had left because she’d turned into some kind of ghost.

Suffocation. Panic. Despair.

Back in the present, Niamh hovered on the edge of consciousness by the heavy iron door of the abandoned electrical room. She felt herself slipping, as if she’d been transported right back to Aldenville.

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