Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 171

Chapter 171

RIVERA

The safe house felt smaller when everyone was inside it.

We’d been spread across the city for four hours, each of us in a specific position with a specific role, the operational structure giving the space between us a purpose. Now that structure had collapsed back into a single room, and seven adults who’d been expecting a crisis and hadn’t gotten one were occupying the same space with the particular tension of people who didn’t know what to do with the alertness they’d built up and hadn’t been able to spend.

Louis was asleep. He’d been with Roy all evening, and Roy had gotten him down before the rest of us returned, which was one of the few clean outcomes of the night.

Everyone else was at the table or near it, the debrief arranged around coffee that Bianca had made when we’d arrived back, which I’d been grateful for and had drunk half of before I’d fully tasted it.

Klaus sat at the head of the table with the expression he used when he was processing something he hadn’t finished processing. Elijah was standing, which he did when he was uncomfortable with a conclusion and wasn’t ready to sit down into it. Mikael had his tablet in front of him, running through feeds with the persistent focus of someone hoping the data was going to change if he looked at it long enough.

Roy was looking at his documents with the specific frown of someone who’d built a careful argument and was now finding a flaw in it.

Bianca was at the far end of the table, her hands wrapped around her coffee mug, looking at nothing in particular. She’d been quiet since we’d reassembled at the car park, quiet in the car on the way back, quiet making coffee. I’d attributed it to the weight of what the evening had been–watching Matthew’s assembly from outside, the compression of everything she’d been carrying about Theo and Matthew and what the night was supposed to accomplish.

But she’d barely spoken during the debrief that had started organically in the car park while we were waiting for Elijah to complete his Thorne trace, and she’d said nothing since we’d come inside.

I was aware of it without knowing what to do with it.

“Let’s say what we’re all thinking,” Elijah said, from his standing position. “The intelligence was solid. The timing logic was sound. The assembly was the optimal window and Thorne was in position. And nothing happened.”

“Nothing we observed happening,” Klaus corrected.

“If something happened that we didn’t observe, our surveillance was inadequate,” Mikael said, not defensively but practically. “And I don’t think our surveillance was inadequate. I think nothing happened.” “Why?” Roy said, looking up from his documents. “That’s the question we need to answer. Why did Voss

pull back, assuming she was ever moving forward to begin with?”

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“She was moving forward,” Elijah said. “The anchor sites were active. The preparation work was real. The timeline we built was based on verified intelligence, not assumption.”

“Then something changed,” Klaus said. “Between when we confirmed the timeline and tonight.”

The silence that followed was the uncomfortable silence of people who’d prepared for a specific scenario and were now understanding that the scenario they’d prepared for had been the preparation for a different scenario they hadn’t anticipated.

We’d been watched watching.

Klaus let the silence sit for a moment, then spoke. “We go back to the intelligence. Everything we have on Voss’s operation, reviewed from the beginning with the assumption that she’s been aware of our surveillance for some portion of the timeline. We find the leak–whether it’s a source, a method, a pattern she identified. And we find where she moves next.” He looked around the table. “Tonight was not the end of this. She still needs three blood sources. The astronomical configuration holds for nine more days. She’s going to move again.”

“And we don’t have enough to move against Thorne,” Mikael said, stating the other part of it plainly. “No observed illegal activity, no confirmed connection to Voss beyond circumstantial intelligence, nothing that constitutes actionable evidence for an arrest or a formal challenge to his position.”

“No,” Klaus agreed. “We don’t.”

The words landed on the table with the weight of what they actually meant. Thorne Lockwood, Chief of Staff to the Alpha King, had attended a neighboring pack’s assembly as a guest and left without incident. There was nothing in that sequence of events that constituted evidence of anything. The circumstantial case we’d been building against him was real and significant and completely insufficient for any formal action.

We were back to watching and waiting.

I looked at Bianca.

She was still holding her coffee mug. Still looking at the table. The shadows under her eyes were deeper than they’d been this morning, and the particular set of her shoulders had something in it that I’d been reading since we’d returned as exhaustion and emotional depletion.