Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 135

Chapter 135

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Chapter 135

Chapter 135

BIANCA

The hospital was quieter than usual for a Thursday afternoon, which I had learned over months of shifts meant nothing except that the chaos was regrouping before its next assault. I’d stopped trusting quiet at BloodMoon General sometime around my third week, when a peaceful Tuesday morning had dissolved into a six–hour magical contamination event that required evacuating two floors.

I kept moving anyway, because moving was what I did when my mind was working on something it hadn’t solved yet.

Louis was home with Rivera and an increased security detail. Vera was stable and growing more alert by the day, which was both medically encouraging and personally complicated, because an alert Vera was a Vera who asked difficult questions and expected honest answers. James had covered my morning rounds without complaint, which meant he’d sensed something was wrong and was giving me room in the particular way he’d developed over months of working beside me–present but not pressing, available but not hovering.

I was grateful for it. I didn’t have the bandwidth for questions I couldn’t answer honestly.

What I did have was three hours before my afternoon patients, a secured office, and the growing certainty that I was missing something in the information I’d spent the previous night assembling.

I spread my notes across the desk–handwritten, because some kinds of thinking required paper–and looked at what I had.

Miriam Voss. Former Council Member. Fifteen years building toward a ritual that required curse–breaker blood from three verified lineages. Eleven days until the astronomical configuration that made the ritual possible.

Elena Rivera. Curse–breaker. Dead five years. Louis’s curse designed to kill her while she tried to break it.

My mother. Curse–breaker. Dead fifteen years. Had been trying to expose what the Council was doing when they found her.

Me. Curse–breaker. Supposed to be dead. Living in BloodMoon City under a name that was technically real but had been obscure enough before my arrival here that no one had immediately connected it to anything.

And Theo.

I kept coming back to Theo.

Roy’s assessment–that Theo was the primary target rather than Louis–made a specific kind of terrible sense when I sat with it. Louis was Elena’s son, which established lineage connection. But Louis had been living under Rivera’s security apparatus for years, and however much Voss’s people had managed to observe and prod him, actually acquiring him would require breaching security that had Alpha King resources behind it.

Theo was different.

Theo had been living in Silver Moon territory with a father who was managing pack politics and personal grief simultaneously. Theo had been brought to BloodMoon City for therapy, had been an unknown quantity moving through a city with no specific protective detail, had then been taken back to a territory where he was even more exposed.

And Theo was my son.

If he’d inherited curse–breaking abilities from me–and I had no way of knowing whether he had, because I’d never had reason to look, because he’d been four years old and I’d been trying to survive a marriage rather than cataloguing potential supernatural inheritance–he would be exactly what Voss needed.

The third blood sample. Verified lineage. Untouched by years of active work.

I pressed my palms flat against the desk and made myself think about it clearly rather than let the maternal panic that kept trying to surface take over.

Chapter 135

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What did I actually know about hereditary curse–breaking?

My mother had taught me that the ability ran in lines, that it could skip generations or appear diminished in some family members and amplified in others. She’d told me her own mother had been a curse–breaker, that her grandmother before that had been one of the foundational practitioners who’d developed the counter–resonance techniques that were now passed down through networks like the one she’d belonged to.

She’d also told me–once, when I’d asked–that the ability in children was usually dormant. Latent. Present in the blood as a signature without yet expressing as functional capacity.

Which meant Theo wouldn’t know. Couldn’t know. And Matthew certainly wouldn’t know, because he’d had no reason to look for it, had no frame of reference for what he was looking at even if he’d thought to check.

But Voss would know. Her people would know. They’d been hunting curse–breakers for long enough to understand what signatures to look for in bloodwork, in behavioral markers, in the way a child responded to magical stimuli.

And Theo had been in their city. Had been in their hospital. Had been-

I stopped.

The pediatric hospital. Dr. James Wright. Louis’s checkup appointment where I’d helped James after the vomiting incident, had stood in the corridor talking about the case he was about to see.

A child who needed help grieving a dead parent. Who had run through a park chasing a stranger they’d thought was their

mother.

I’d thought it was a coincidence. Had thought about it with professional sympathy and moved on, because BloodMoon General handled dozens of complex pediatric cases and the emotional weight of each one couldn’t be carried indefinitely or the job would become impossible.

But what if it hadn’t been coincidence?

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