Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 167

Chapter 167

KLAUS

He was quiet for a moment. The frown shifted slightly–not deepening, but changing, like something inside it was trying to resolve into words and couldn’t quite get there.

“Nothing,” he said finally. He looked back down at the Ankylosaurus. “Never mind.”

The room held a beat of stillness. Then Elijah moved to update a position marker, and Mikael returned to his phone, and Rivera pushed off from the window to look at the layout, and the moment passed the way moments did when everyone agreed without speaking to let it pass.

But I watched Louis for another few seconds after everyone else had moved on.

He wasn’t looking at the Ankylosaurus. He was looking at it without seeing it, the way you looked at something in your hands when your attention was actually elsewhere. His jaw was set in the particular way it got when he was holding something in rather than letting it out.

He put the Ankylosaurus down carefully, at the edge of the formation, slightly separated from the others.

Then he picked up the Triceratops instead, and went back to his formation arrangement, and didn’t look at Bianca again.

I filed it away and returned my attention to the briefing.

“Positions,” I said. “Elijah, walk us through the placement.”

Elijah moved to the display and ran through the positioning plan with the efficiency of someone who’d been doing operational placement for years. Rivera and I would be inside the assembly building, moving independently, visible as attending observers without being visibly together. Mikael would be in the car park, monitoring the two unidentified vehicles and ready to move if they changed position. Roy would be at the perimeter, covering the east exit route.

Bianca would make contact with Matthew before the assembly and then position at the secondary east exit–the one Thorne didn’t know we’d identified as his planned route. If he moved toward Theo, she was the stop.

Everyone understood their role. Everyone confirmed it without the kind of excessive discussion that happened when people weren’t sure they understood, which meant we were as ready as we were going to be.

“One more thing,” Bianca said, as Elijah finished. She looked at me. “The doppelganger possibility. Voss used it to place someone among Theo’s caregivers, or could attempt to. If a face we recognize behaves in a way that’s slightly wrong, we treat it as a potential replacement rather than assuming we’re misreading them.”

I looked at her.

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Chapter 167

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“She’s right,” Elijah said. “We’ve been operating on the assumption that the people we know are the people we know. If Voss has that capability and we’ve confirmed she’s used it, we should assume she’ll use it wherever it provides advantage.”

“Agreed,” I said. “Trust your instincts tonight. If something reads wrong, it probably is wrong.”

The briefing wrapped up. People moved to their positions. Rivera stayed behind for a moment, exchanging something quiet with Bianca that wasn’t for the room, and then he was out the door with Elijah.

Louis came to me before I followed.

He stopped in front of me and looked up with the direct gaze he used when he wanted to be taken seriously.

“Klaus,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Something is wrong.” He said it simply, without drama, the way he said things when he’d thought about them long enough to be certain. “I don’t know what it is. But something is wrong.”

I crouched down to his level and looked at him seriously, because he deserved seriousness. “What kind of wrong?”

He glanced at the door Bianca had gone through, then back at me. “I don’t know,” he said. “She smells right. She sounds right. But something is-” He stopped, his face doing the thing it did when he was reaching for something beyond his vocabulary. “She didn’t know which mug was hers,” he said finally.” This morning. She picked up the wrong one and then she put it down and picked up a different one. But Mummy always knows which one is hers because she always uses the same one.”

I looked at him for a long moment.

It was such a small thing. Such an impossibly small thing.

A coffee mug.

“Louis,” I said carefully. “I want you to stay with Roy tonight. You don’t go anywhere without Roy, and you tell him immediately if you notice anything else that seems wrong. Can you do that?”

He looked at me with eyes that were five years old and much older than five years old at the same time.” Is Mummy okay?” he said.

I held his gaze and made a decision about what he could carry and what he couldn’t. “We’re going to make sure everyone is okay,” I said. “That’s what tonight is for.”

He considered this for a moment. Then he nodded, once, with the gravity of someone accepting a difficult truth that had been framed as carefully as possible.

He picked up the Ankylosaurus from where he’d left it at the edge of the formation.

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