Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 150

Chapter 150

Chapter 150

RIVERA

The safe house had four bedrooms, a kitchen that smelled faintly of someone else’s coffee, and a security system that Klaus had arranged through channels I didn’t ask about. It was functional, anonymous, and about as far from home as I’d felt in months.

Louis was asleep in the second bedroom, dinosaurs arranged on the pillow beside him in the formation he’d started calling “night watch.” I’d checked on him twice since putting him down, standing in the doorway and listening to his breathing, doing the thing I’d done hundreds of times over five years- counting the steadiness of each exhale and letting it reassure me that we were okay.

We were not entirely okay. But Louis was sleeping, and that was something.

Bianca was in the main room, at the table, with her notes spread around her and a cup of tea that had gone cold at her elbow. She’d been sitting there since we’d returned from the school, since the three of us had ridden back mostly in silence, each processing different versions of the same afternoon.

I’d watched her watch Theo.

Had sat in the driver’s seat and kept my eyes forward as much as I could, giving her privacy for something that deserved privacy, and had caught enough in my peripheral vision to understand the shape of what she was feeling without needing to see all of it. The way she’d gone still when she found him in the playground. The moment he laughed, and what happened in her face.

The way she’d held herself together with the same discipline she brought to everything–completely, and

at real cost.

I’d given her space since we’d returned. Had made tea, settled Louis, exchanged brief logistical updates with Klaus, done the small practical things that needed doing. Had let her sit with her notes and her cold tea and whatever she was working through.

But it was nearly ten o’clock, and the lights in the main room were still on, and I’d run out of practical things to do that weren’t really just ways of not going in there.

I went in.

She looked up when I entered, and her expression was the particular one she had when she’d been somewhere internal and was finding her way back to the room. “Louis?”

“Sleeping. Night watch is deployed.” I sat down across from her. “How are you doing?”

“I’ve been mapping Voss’s likely anchor points based on the geographic information Elijah sent.” She gestured at the notes. “If she’s using the isolated property as her base, the anchors will need to be within a certain radius to create the contained field the ritual requires. I’ve identified four probable locations based on the lay lines Roy documented.”

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“That’s not what I asked.”

She looked at me.

“I asked how you’re doing,” I said. “The anchor mapping can wait ten minutes.”

Something shifted in her expression–not breaking, Bianca didn’t break easily, but something releasing. She sat back in her chair and let her hands come to rest on the table rather than on her notes.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I keep trying to find the right word for it and I can’t.” She looked at the cold tea. “I saw him. He’s okay. He has friends, he’s going to therapy, his father showed up for him.” She paused.” All the things I hoped for when I made the choice to stay away. And seeing them be true is-” She stopped again.

“Is not the same as being glad they’re true,” I said.

“No.” She looked at me. “Does that make me terrible? That I can be glad for him and still–still want to have been the one. Still want it to have been different.”

“No,” I said. “It makes you human.”

She was quiet for a moment. Outside, somewhere in the dark, one of Klaus’s security team made a circuit of the property perimeter. We both heard the quiet footsteps and recognized them for what they were and let them pass.

“Louis said he could sit in our corner,” I said. “When this is over.”

Something moved across her face that I didn’t have a word for. “I know. I heard him.” She pressed her fingers against her eyes for a moment. “He has so much room in him for people. I don’t know where he got it.”

“You,” I said. “He got it from watching you.”

She lowered her hands and looked at me with an expression that was complicated enough that I let it be complicated without trying to smooth it into something simpler.

“Lucian,” she said. “There’s something I want to say. About everything that happened, about the secrets, about-” She paused, organizing. “I’ve been thinking about what you told me. About why you held things back. The fear of losing me, the terror that if I had full information I’d make choices that took me away.”

“Bianca, I know it wasn’t-”

“Let me finish,” she said, not sharply. Just clear.

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