Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 160

Chapter 160

Chapter 160

RIVERA

I woke at six–fifteen to the smell of coffee.

For a moment, coming up from sleep that had been shallow and interrupted, I lay still and let that smell do what it always did- orient me, remind me where I was. Not home. The safe house. Silver Moon territory. The rough texture of the unfamiliar pillow, the slightly different quality of the light through curtains that weren’t ours.

Then I remembered that Bianca had gone out last night, and I was fully awake.

I sat up and listened.

The house was quiet in the way it was when Louis was still sleeping–a particular quality of morning stillness that changed the moment he was awake, because Louis woke with intent and the intent was immediately audible. Coffee smell meant someone was in the kitchen. Which meant Bianca was back.

She was back.

The telief that moved through me was physical, something that loosened in my chest and let me breathe more fully than I had since I’d heard the car pull away the previous night.

I got up, pulled on clothes, and went to find her.

She was at the kitchen table. Sitting with a mug between both hands, looking out the window at the narrow strip of garden that the safe house possessed–patchy grass, a low fence, the grey of an early morning that hadn’t decided yet whether it was going to be a good day or a bad one.

She had her back mostly to me when I came in, and she didn’t turn immediately, which I attributed to being deep in thought. She did that. Got so far into whatever she was processing that the rest of the room temporarily ceased to exist for her.

“Hey,” I said.

She turned then, and looked at me, and something in my chest settled further at the sight of her face. Tired. She looked tired, with shadows under her eyes that said the night hadn’t been restful, which made sense given everything.

“Hey,” she said. Her voice was quiet. “Coffee’s made.”

“I can see that.” I went to the pot and poured a mug, then brought it to the table and sat down across from her. The table was small–everything in the safe house was slightly smaller than comfortable, functional without generosity. I could see her face clearly from here.

She was looking at the window again.

“Did you go?” I asked.

A beat. She turned the mug slightly in her hands, both palms wrapped around the ceramic. “I drove there,” she said.

I waited.

“I got to the street. Parked down from the house.” She paused, the particular pause of someone deciding how to explain something they’d been sitting with for hours. “There were lights on upstairs. His bedroom window.” Another pause. “And Mia’s car was in the driveway.”

I was quiet

“I sat there for a while,” she continued. “Maybe twenty minutes. The lights stayed on” She looked at her coffee rather than at

turn everything upside down, blow up whatever he’s been building toward me. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t walk into that house

Chopted g

25 Bonus

that assembly tonight, make it about me when he’s already dealing with She stopped. “And if Mia was there, if they were–If there was something still happening there” She shook her head slightly, “I drove back.”

I looked at her.

The reasoning was so precisely right. So exactly the kind of conclusion Bianca would reach after sitting outside a house in the dark for twenty minutes, weighing what was hers to disrupt against what wasn’t. The particular way she had of removing herself from equations when she decided her presence would cost more than it contributed. The willingness to absorb the painful option rather than create complications for someone else.

I recognized all of it. Had watched her make that kind of calculation dozens of times over the months she’d been in our lives.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That you had to sit there and make that call alone.”

She looked at me then. Her eyes were steady, slightly tired, holding whatever the night had cost her with the composure she brought to everything difficult. “It was my call to make,” she said. “I made it.”

“Do you think it was the right one?”

A longer pause. “I think it was the one I could live with,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s the same thing.”

I didn’t push further. Bianca knew her own mind, and she knew Matthew’s situation better than I did, and she’d been the one sitting in that car in the dark while I’d been here checking on Louis and trying not to think too hard about what might be happening

If she’d decided the timing was wrong, if seeing Mia’s car had shifted the calculation–I believed her judgment.

I reached across the small table and put my hand over hers briefly. She looked down at it, then up at me.

“Klaus is going to want a briefing this morning,” I said, keeping my voice practical, giving her the transition back to logistics because sometimes that was the kindest thing. “On timing for the assembly. And Roy has more information about the anchor

locations-”

“I know.” She turned her hand slightly under mine, a small acknowledgment. “I’ll look at Roy’s documentation after Louis is up.

As if

direction of the second bedroom, we heard the specific sound of Louis becoming conscious with purpose

1. nd. It never was. It was the immediate thump of small feet hitting the floor, followed by the particular

at that meant he’d grabbed the night watch dinosaurs off the pillow before doing anything else, followed with the confidence of someone who knew where he was going.

the kitchen doorway in his pajamas, hair going in several directions, the Ankylosaurus in one hand and the

the other.

ed at me first–registered

is face did the thing it did.

“MUMMY.”

He crossed the kitche

child who’d never b

someone arriving

She wrapped

I watched

Ther

ence, moved on

and then found Bianca at the table.

ed her arms and he climbed into her lap with the total physical confidence of a ular request, settling against her chest with the immediate boneless relaxation of

ed to be.

rface going into the top of his head, and held ou

ay she held him both armis fully engaged, her whole posture reorienting toward him—that he specific quality of how Blanca held Louis was something I’d catalogued without meaning to

Chapter 180

+25 Bonus

over months of watching them together, the way you catalogued things you loved without consciously deciding to. It was right. It looked right.

The knot in my chest, which had been present since I’d heard her car pull away last night, loosened another degree.

“You were gone,” Louis informed her, his voice somewhat muffled by her shoulder.

“I’m back now,” she said.

“You didn’t say goodnight.”

“I know. I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

He pulled back enough to look at her face, performing the assessment he sometimes did when he wanted to determine if an adult was actually okay or just performing okay. He studied her for a moment with the serious eyes that always saw more than was comfortable.

“Your eyes look tired,” he said.

“They are a little bit tired,” she said. “I didn’t sleep very well.”

“I didn’t sleep very well either,” he said, with the tone of someone establishing common ground. “I had a dream about the shadow but then it went away. And then I was awake and I looked at the night watch and they were all there so I went back to sleep.”

Comments