Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 157

Chapter 157

Chapter 157

BIANCA

The first thing I noticed was the pain.

It started at the back of my head and spread forward like something heavy was pressing against the inside of my skull. My thoughts felt slow and thick, like they were moving through water. I tried to open my eyes and immediately regretted it because even the dim light in the room felt like needles.

I closed them again and stayed still, trying to remember how to breathe normally.

In. Out. In. Out.

The second thing I noticed was that I couldn’t move my hands.

I tested this carefully, without opening my eyes, without making any visible movement that might signal to anyone watching that I was awake. My wrists were bound behind my back, something rough against my skin that felt like rope. My ankles were tied too, crossed and secured to what I was sitting on, which felt like a wooden chair with a solid back.

The third thing I noticed was the barrier.

This one wasn’t something I could see or touch. It was something I felt, the way I felt all magical things, through the particular sense my mother had called the inner ear. A pressure around the edges of the space I was in. A resistance that pushed back against my own magical signature, the way two magnets push against each other when you try to force them together.

Someone had enclosed me in a spell. A containment charm of significant quality, built to hold someone like me specifically.

I kept my breathing even. Kept my eyes closed. Kept listening.

There were voices somewhere to my right. Low, not close, the murmur of people talking in another room or far enough away that the words were sounds rather than meaning. Two voices, maybe three. I couldn’t tell yet.

The room smelled like stone and damp earth, like somewhere underground or very old. There was something else underneath it, something sharp and chemical that I recognized after a moment as the specific smell of active magical preparation. Not a spell being cast right now, but the residue of recent work. The smell that clung to spaces where significant magic had been performed repeatedly over time.

I tried to remember what had happened.

It came back in pieces, the way memory always came back after a head injury. My brain offering fragments rather than the full picture, making me assemble them in order.

The safe house. Lucian at the table. Louis sleeping with his night watch. Rivera saying I’ll come back and meaning it.

The car. Driving through Silver Moon territory in the dark, the roads quiet, heading toward the residential address I’d found for Matthew through pack records that Klaus had accessed for our intelligence work. The clock on the dashboard reading eleven- forty–seven.

The headlights behind me.

I hadn’t thought anything of them at first. There were other cars on the road, even at that hour. I’d been focused on what I was going to say to Matthew, running through it in my mind, the specific words for a conversation I’d been building toward for days.

The headlights had gotten closer very fast.

Too fast.

The impact had come from the rear, hard enough to throw me forward against the seatbelt, hard enough that my head had hit

Chapter 157

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something–the steering wheel, maybe, or the side window when the car had spun. I remembered the spinning. The particular disorientation of a vehicle that was no longer doing what physics normally required it to do.

Then the ground.

Then nothing.

Until now. This room. This chair. This pain.

I opened my eyes slowly, giving them time to adjust.

The room was large and low–ceilinged, built from old stone that had the look of something that had been here for a very long time. The light came from sources I couldn’t immediately locate, a diffuse glow that was too steady to be candles and too dim and yellowish to be electric lighting. Probably some kind of magical illumination, practical and permanent.

There were symbols on the floor.

They covered most of the visible stone surface, drawn in something dark red that I recognized with a cold feeling in my stomach. I knew what those symbols were. Had seen their like in documents Roy had shared, in the historical records that described the ritual we’d been trying to prevent.

Preparation work. Anchoring marks.

I was inside the ritual preparation site.

I tested the barrier again, this time actively, pushing my own magical sense against its edges to understand what I was dealing with. It pushed back immediately, firm and well–constructed. Whoever had built it knew what they were doing. It wasn’t just a containment–it was specifically designed to neutralize curse–breaking abilities, to prevent the kind of counter–resonance work that would have let me unravel it from the inside.

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