Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 172

Chapter 172

RIVERA

I thought about her, earlier tonight. Sitting in the car outside the pack house, watching Matthew go in.

Thought about what she’d said this morning. About Mia’s car in the driveway, about sitting in the dark and making the call she could live with, about coming back.

She’d come back.

She was here, quiet at the end of the table, and the night had been long and nothing had gone as planned and she was tired in a way that had been building for days.

I wanted to give her a better ending to the night than this debrief. Wanted to give her the clean resolution that she’d been working toward and hadn’t gotten.

I didn’t have it. None of us did.

The debrief wound down. There was nothing more to be said tonight that was going to produce useful conclusions–we were past the point of information and into the point of needing sleep to think clearly, and Klaus was the first one to name that.

“Get some rest,” he said. “We work again in the morning.”

People moved. Elijah went to the room he’d claimed. Mikael spent five more minutes with his tablet before following. Roy gathered his documents with his habitual neatness.

Klaus paused near the door and looked at me briefly, a look that held something I couldn’t fully decode in my current state of tired. Then he went.

Bianca and I were the last ones in the main room.

I started collecting coffee mugs from the table–the small automatic tidying of someone who needed to do something with their hands. She watched me for a moment, then stood and brought her own mug to

the counter.

We stood at the counter together in the quiet of the aftermath.

“He did well tonight,” she said. “Matthew. His speech.”

“I heard some of it,” I said. “From the corridor.”

“I watched through a window,” she said. “The side window, near the east entrance. I could see him.”

She’d watched through a window. I’d known she was somewhere near the building’s exterior, had known her operational position was the secondary east exit, but I hadn’t known she’d found a way to watch him.

I looked at her profile. The tiredness in it. The other thing underneath the tiredness that I’d been reading

Chopt all day as the emotional cost of all of it.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She was quiet for a moment.

“I’m tired,” she said. “I’m very tired.”

“I know.”

“I want this to be over,” she said. “I want to go home.”

There was something in the way she said it. Not dramatically, not with the weight of a significant declaration–just plainly. The simple statement of someone who’d been away from home long enough that home had become the primary thing they were thinking about.

“We’ll figure out the next steps in the morning,” I said. “Get some sleep.”

She nodded, not looking at me. “I will.”

She went to the room she’d been sleeping in, and I heard the door close.

I stood at the kitchen counter for a moment longer, looking at the empty mugs.

The next morning, she was already up when I came downstairs.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify