Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 142

Chapter 142

KLAUS

+25 Bonus

“I’m going to tell her everything tonight,” Lucian said. “About the call with Matthew, about Thorne’s positioning, about where Voss is. And then I’m going to tell her the thing I’ve been holding back since she arrived in this city.”

I didn’t need to ask what he meant. There was only one thing left, and we both knew it.

“Lucian,” I said. “It’s time.”

“I know.” A long exhale. “Klaus, if she leaves after–if she decides she can’t-”

“Then you will have been honest, and she will have made an informed choice,” I said. “Which is all you ever owed her.” I paused. “But I don’t think that’s what happens. I’ve watched her with you..With Louis. With the life she’s built here. That doesn’t disappear because the foundation turns out to be more complicated than she knew.”

“You can’t know that.”

“No,” I admitted. “But I can observe evidence and draw reasonable conclusions. And the evidence suggests that Bianca Morrison is not a woman who makes her choices based on convenience or simple circumstances. She makes them based on what she actually believes is right.” I let that sit. “She chose to stay when she could have kept running. She chose Louis when she didn’t have to. She chose you, Lucian, in the full knowledge that it was complicated and costly and might not work out. That’s the woman you’re about to tell the truth to.”

The silence on his end was long and full of something I recognized.

Fear.

“Tell her,” I said gently. “Then get some sleep–both of you, if you can. Because we leave for Silver Moon at six in the morning, and I need everyone clearheaded.”

“All of us?”

“All of us,” I confirmed. “Elijah, Mikael, Roy, the full security team. Whatever happens at that assembly, we are not going in underequipped.” I paused.

“And Lucian? Whatever conversation you have with Bianca tonight–whatever she decides–I need her skills in Silver Moon territory. I need her to be able to identify Voss’s magical anchors and counteract them. Which means I need her willing and informed and not blindsided by something she should have been told weeks ago.”

“Understood.”

“Good.” I looked at the map one more time. At the isolated property in the blind spot. At the timeline that had compacted from comfortable to urgent. “Six AM. Have everyone ready.”

“Klaus.” His voice was quiet. “Thank you. For the call with Matthew. For-” He stopped. “For still being here.”

It was the kind of thing he said rarely, which made it land with more weight when he did.

“Where else would I be,” I said, which was not a question.

1 ended the call and stood alone in the war room for a long moment.

Five years. Lucian retreating into his grief while I held the public–facing pieces together, ran the intelligence apparatus, kept the systems functioning while the man at the center of them found his way back. It had never felt like a burden–had felt like the obvious thing, the thing you did for someone who’d been your closest friend since you were both young men figuring out what it meant to carry power responsibly.

Chapter 142

But five years was a long time to hold something.

+25 Bor

And now Bianca was downstairs in the kitchen, probably making tea because she made tea when she was thinking hard, and Lucian was about to walk in and tell her the thing he’d been circling for months, and the whole carefully maintained edifice of managed half–truths was going to come down.

I hoped it came down cleanly. I hoped she heard it the way I thought she would–not as betrayal but as evidence of someone who’d been so afraid of losing her that he’d made the mistake of trying to control the information that might take her away.

I hoped Lucian had enough words for it.

He usually did, when it actually mattered.

I turned off half the lights in the war room, leaving the map table illuminated, and moved to the door. I had four hours of sleep available to me if I used them efficiently. I intended to use them, because tomorrow was going to require everything I had, and I’d learned over many years of crisis management that tired leadership made errors that rested leadership did not.

At the door, I paused.

Somewhere in the city–in a building I didn’t know the location of yet, but would–Miriam Voss was conducting fifteen years o preparation toward a ritual that would, if completed, reshape the power structure of the entire territory.

She’d spent fifteen years being patient.

We had six days to be smarter.

I turned off the last light and went to find what rest I could before morning.

At four–thirty AM, two hours before our planned departure, I was back in the war room because sleep had proven theoretical

rather than actual.

Elijah had sent updates through the night: Thorne’s vehicle remained stationary at the isolated property. Thermal imaging now suggested six people inside rather than four. No movement in or out after midnight.

Roy had sent a document summarizing what he’d found about the property’s magical history: the land had been registered as an inactive ritual site under an obscure Council provision that predated most current oversight frameworks. The registration was sixty years old, which meant it was grandfathered through several layers of regulatory reform and appeared on almost no current monitoring lists.

Voss had known exactly what she was doing when she’d chosen it.

I was reviewing tactical options–how close we could get before triggering whatever surveillance she’d established around the perimeter, whether attempting to disrupt the anchors now was worth the risk of alerting her to our knowledge of her position- when the door to the war room opened.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify