Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 173

Chapter 173

BIANCA

The barrier had a rhythm.

It took me most of the first day to understand that, because the first day was mostly spent managing the concussion, keeping myself conscious through the headache that pressed behind my eyes like something trying to get out, drinking the water they brought me without tasting it, and waiting for my thoughts to stop moving through fog and start moving through air again.

They fed me twice. A woman I hadn’t seen before, not Voss, middle–aged and quiet with the focused expression of someone who’d decided that the person they were feeding wasn’t a person in any way that required acknowledgment. She untied my hands each time under the watch of a second person who stood by the door, and retied them after. The rope was the same rope, charmed the same way. I tested it each time she retied it, carefully, the smallest possible movement, learning the specific quality of its resistance.

The barrier was what I worked on in the hours between.

My mother had taught me that magical constructions were like physical ones. A wall built by a single pair of hands had a consistency to it–the same pressure applied in the same way across the whole surface, the same decisions made repeatedly in the same manner. You could feel the builder’s signature in it the way you could see a carpenter’s style in joined wood. Consistent. Recognizable. Hard to find weakness in, because the weakness, if any, would be distributed evenly across the whole structure.

But a wall built by two pairs of hands–or a barrier constructed by two practitioners–was different.

Two people brought two signatures. Two ways of applying pressure, two sets of instincts about where to reinforce and where the material could be trusted to hold itself. And where they joined their work, where one practitioner’s section met another’s, there was always a seam. Not always visible. Not always exploitable. But always there, if you were patient enough and precise enough to find it.

I had been pressing at the barrier for two days.

The guards checked on me at intervals I’d been counting–roughly every four hours during what I estimated was the day cycle based on the faint changes in the ambient temperature of the room, which dropped slightly when the sun went down somewhere above the stone I was encased in. Every four hours, one of the quiet ones or occasionally someone I hadn’t seen before. They checked that I was conscious, that the ropes were intact, that nothing had visibly changed.

Nothing had visibly changed.

What had changed was what I knew about the barrier.

On the first day, I’d found the outer boundary. The shape of it, the extent–a sphere of roughly four meters diameter centered on my chair, which told me something about the practitioner’s confidence. A tighter construction would have been more efficient, harder to work on from the inside. The four–meter sphere was generous, which meant either they wanted me to have room to move when I was untied for meals, or the practitioner preferred working at scale. Both said something about their approach.

On the second day, I found the join.

It was on the western side of the sphere, roughly at chest height if I was standing. I couldn’t stand–my ankles were still tied to the chair–but I could lean, and I’d been leaning during the long hours between

checks, pressing my awareness against the barrier in slow circuits, covering the same ground repeatedly and looking for the place where it changed.

It changed there.

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