Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 159

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Chapter 159

Chapter 159

BIANCA

Ten days. The ritual window.

“And Louis?” I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. “You said the same thing-‘

“The boy will have a visitor soon,” Voss said. “Another excellent piece of work. His will be somewhat simpler because children are less perceptive about the fine details of adults than adults are about each other.” She paused. “And the Morrison boy. We have arrangements in place for him as well.” She looked at me with the calm of someone who’d thought through every angle for a very long time. “By the time anyone realizes what’s actually happened, we’ll have everything we need.”

“Theo is four years old,” I said. My voice was quiet. “He’s four years old and he’s already been through—”

“I know how old he is,” Voss said, without particular feeling. “And I understand that you’re his mother, and that this is painful to contemplate. But Bianca, this work is larger than any individual. What the ritual makes possible–the stability it creates, the consolidation of pack governance under unified leadership-”

“Slavery,” I said. “You’re describing slavery. You want to bind every Alpha in the territory to your will. Everything they do, everyone connected to them, controlled by you.”

“Directed,” she said, with the patience of someone correcting a misunderstanding they’d corrected many times before. “Not enslaved. Directed. Toward stability. Toward an end to the territorial conflicts and pack politics that have cost thousands of lives over the past century.” She sat down on a low stone bench a few feet away, settling into the conversation as if we had all the time in the world and she was genuinely interested in persuading me. “Your mother and I disagreed about method, not about the fundamental problem. Pack governance is fractured. Individual Alphas making individual decisions based on individual interests is a system that fails its people regularly. Someone needs to hold the larger vision.”

“And that someone is you,” I said.

“For now,” she said. “The ritual establishes the framework. Others can work within it.‘

“The people connected to those Alphas–their mates, their pack members–they don’t get a choice. They’re bound by

association.”

“People rarely get a choice in the governance systems they live under,” she said. “At least this one would be stable.”

I looked at her and understood, with the particular clarity that came sometimes when you were in pain and afraid and had stripped away everything but the essential, that there was nothing I could say that would change her mind. She’d had fifteen years to build this belief into something structural, something that held together her entire sense of what she was doing and why.

Arguing with it wasn’t going to help me.

What was going to help me was time. And information. And keeping her talking while my head cleared and I continued to assess the barrier and the room and every possible variable.

“How long have you been planning this specific operation?” I asked. “The children. Using them instead of adults.

She looked at me with something that might have been appreciation for the question. “The children became the focus when the adult practitioners became too difficult to access. Your mother’s network was more organized than we’d anticipated they’d built warning systems, escape routes, methods for disappearing quickly” She paused. “Children are more accessible. And as I mentioned, child blood from a verified lineage is actually more potent for our purposes than adult blood! It’s purer. Less complicated by years of active magical work”

“Elena Rivera,” I said.

Chopte wa

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Something shifted in Voss’s expression. Subtle, but there. “Elena was regrettable,” she said, after a moment. “She was gifted, and she chose the wrong response to a situation that could have been handled more simply.” She paused. “If she’d cooperated, she would still be alive. Her son would have been unharmed.”

“She died trying to save her son from a curse you put on him,” I said. “And you call that regrettable.”

“I call it unnecessary,” Voss said, with the quiet certainty of someone who’d made peace with what they’d done. “She made choices that led to a painful outcome. As did you, in a different way.” She stood. “Rest. The next few days will be easier if you’re not exhausted.”

She moved toward the door.

“Voss,” I said.

She paused without turning.

“You said the doppelganger was built from my hair,” I said. “That means someone close to me provided access. Someone who could take my hair without my knowledge.” I let that sit. “That’s a short list of people.”

She did turn then, and looked at me with the expression of someone who’d just recalculated something.

Then she smiled. “Rest,” she said again. “You’re going to need it.”

She walked through the door and the sound of her footsteps faded into the larger quiet of the building around me.

I sat in the chair with my hands bound behind me and the barrier pressing against my magical sense and the symbols on the floor surrounding me and I made myself think.

The doppelganger was at the safe house. Rivera thought I was there, thought I’d come back, thought I was asleep with a

headache.

Louis was with someone who looked like me.

And Theo–Voss had said arrangements were in place. The assembly was tonight. Thorne was already in Silver Moon territory.

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