Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 114

Chapter 114

Chapter 114

RIVERA

“I know.” I kept my voice level. “I have people checking security footage. We’ll know where and when within the hour.”

Something moved across her face–acknowledgment, understanding, the connection of two people who’d been building toward this, understanding each other with few words needed.

“Okay,” she said. She turned back to Louis. “I’m going to need you to do something for me, and it’s going to feel strange. I’m going to put my hands on your forearms and I’m going to do the same thing I’ve done before–the counter–resonance work. Do you remember what that feels like?”

“Warm,” Louis said. “And kind of fizzy.”

“Exactly like that. It’s going to feel more intense this time because what’s happening is more active than usual. But it shouldn’t hurt. If it hurts, you tell me immediately and I stop. Understand?”

Louis nodded.

“And your job–your only job–is to breathe as normally as you can. In and out. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Good boy.” She glanced up at me. “Lucian, I need you to step back slightly. I need to be able to move.”

I stepped back. Gave her room. Watched.

The extraction work she did on Louis was different from what I’d seen her do with other patients–more intimate, more precise, requiring a sustained focus that made the room feel different, quieter, as if the air itself was holding still.

D

She worked with both hands on his forearms, her eyes unfocused in the way that meant she was operating primarily by feel. Louis’s breathing gradually, began to even out.

The purple discoloration started to fade.

Not quickly–this wasn’t a dramatic change. This was painstaking, patient work, the color receding millimeter by millimeter as Bianca slowly addressed whatever had been triggered.

Forty minutes.

I stood at the side of the bay for forty minutes and watched my son’s face and watched Bianca work and thought about everything that was still unresolved between us and chose, not to think about it.

Louis needed her focused. She was focused. Everything else was secondary.

When the color had finally retreated to his fingertips–still faintly present, still requiring monitoring, but no longer advancing –she sat back on her heels and took a long breath.

“Okay.” Her voice was slightly hoarse. “The active trigger is deactivated. The fragment is destabilized. His system should begin naturally clearing it over the next several hours.”

Louis’s eyes were fully open now, the foggy disorientation gone, replaced by the alert watchfulness that was more his natural

state.

“Is it gone?” he asked.

“Not completely yet. But it stopped getting worse, and now it’s going to get better.” She looked at him with the directness she always used with him. “Someone put something in you today that wasn’t supposed to be there. We’re going to find out who.”

Chapter 114

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Louis absorbed this as he nodded his head, exposed to enough to have his opinions on them. “They’re bad people.”

“Yes,” Bianca agreed, without softening it. “They are.”

“Will Daddy find them?”

Bianca glanced at me. Something passed between us as she looked back at Louis and replied.

“Yes,” she said. “Your daddy is going to find them.”

I held her gaze for a moment. Then I nodded, once, accepting the commitment she’d made on my behalf.

Because she was right. I was going to find them.

I turned slightly and pulled out my phone. Klaus had sent three messages while I’d been watching Bianca work:

*Footage from 8:47 AM. Near the school gate. Gray coat, kept his face turned. But the signature on the fragment we extracted last month–Elijah says it’s consistent. It was one of Thorne’s people.*

*Louis wasn’t the target. Or not the primary one. We think this was a message.*

*Lucian, they know about Bianca.*

I read the messages twice. Let the implications settle.

Thorne’s people had triggered Louis’s curse not to hurt Louis–or not only to hurt Louis–but to force Bianca into active curse- extraction work where she could be observed. To confirm what they apparently already suspected.

That the woman treating Louis was someone who should be dead.

I looked up. Bianca was still with Louis, talking to him quietly, explaining what would happen next: monitoring, rest, follow–up scans, the plan for the next twenty–four hours.

She didn’t know yet what I was holding.

She would. Soon.

But right now, Louis was stable. Bianca had done what she always did when it mattered most–she’d shown up and she’d fixed it and she’d made him feel safe. My phone was in my hand with evidence that everything we’d been building toward in terms of exposing Thorne had just shifted from careful investigation into something more immediate, more dangerous.

And I had one more truth I still hadn’t told her.

I had a choice, right now, in this moment.

I could keep holding it. Could decide she’d had enough today, that Louis needed calm, that the timing wasn’t right.

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