Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 174

Chapter 174

BIANCA

I worked.

The join in the barrier had begun to respond to my attention. Not yielding–not yet–but changing in the way materials changed when you applied consistent pressure over time. A slight softening. A loosening of the tension in that particular section, the two practitioners‘ work beginning to separate at the seam in the way that joined things separated when one side was warm and the other was cool and the expansion rates were different.

I was being the warmth.

Slow, patient, continuous.

In the gaps between pressing at the barrier, when I needed to rest the specific kind of focused attention that counter–resonance work required, I thought.

I thought about the doppelganger.

Voss had said it was built from my hair and memories. Hair was easy to access–I shed hair constantly, as everyone did. In the safe house, in the hospital, anywhere I’d been for the past weeks. Anyone who’d had access to spaces I’d occupied could have collected what they needed.

That was a long list. It included almost everyone I’d been around since arriving in Blood Moon City. The memories were more difficult. Building a convincing doppelganger required more than physical resemblance–it required behavioral patterns, specific knowledge, the particular texture of how a person moved through their daily life. That was harder to collect from a distance. That required proximity. Real proximity, over real time.

I thought about who had that kind of access to me.

James. Rivera. Louis. Klaus. The hospital staff I worked with regularly. 1

I thought about whether any of them could be working for Voss, and then I put that line of thought away. because spiraling into paranoid assessments of everyone I’d come to trust was not useful and would not help me work.

What I could do was work.

I pressed at the join.

The barrier gave slightly. So slightly that for a moment I wasn’t sure I’d felt it–thought maybe I was so exhausted and so focused that I was manufacturing the sensation I wanted to feel. But I held my attention there and pressed again, and it gave again, the same slight yielding, unmistakable this time.

Not a gap. Not yet. But a beginning.

I thought about Louis’s night watch. The dinosaurs arranged on his pillow in their formation, the seric attention he brought to their positioning, the way he’d explained to me once that the Ankylosaurus wa the most important guard because it was the most defensive. The tail, he’d said, with the authority of someone who’d researched the matter thoroughly. The tail was the weapon. It goes on the outside of formation where it can protect the others.

He’d put the Ankylosaurus on the outside.

I thought about the weight of him in my arms. The particular way he settled against my chest when I h him, the immediacy of it, the way he’d always just fit there from the very first time–as if he’d identified the exact configuration that worked best and committed to it without negotiation.

I thought about Rivera at the kitchen table in the early mornings, before Louis was awake, the specific quiet of that hour and his hands around his coffee mug and the way he looked at me sometimes when he thought I wasn’t noticing, with an expression that contained things he was still learning to say.

I thought about Theo in the playground. Thirty meters away, laughing.

The join gave a little more.

I breathed steadily. Kept the pressure even. Kept the pace slow.

My mother’s voice: patience is not passive. Patience is active waiting. You are not resting when you are patient. You are maintaining contact while the work does what work needs time to do.

I was maintaining contact.

The barrier was old work–not hastily constructed, not the work of someone who’d built this in response to my capture. This had been built over time, prepared for a specific purpose, designed to hold a specific kind of person. Which meant the practitioners who’d built it had known they were going to need it before they’d needed it. Had prepared for the eventuality of capturing a curse–breaker.

Which meant they’d done this before. Had held people like me before.

I didn’t let myself follow that thought to its conclusion. There would be time for grief and anger later Right now there was only the join and the pressure and the patient work.

The guards came.

I pulled my awareness back from the barrier completely, a careful retraction rather than a sudden withdrawal–sudden withdrawal left traces, the magical equivalent of a door closing too fast I settled into the chair and relaxed my posture and looked at the wall and let the guard do their check.

They were efficient about it. Checked my ropes, checked my face, checked the barrier with a brief assessment that I’d been watching carefully enough to understand was surface–level only. They weren’t pressing into the join. They were checking that the outer boundary was intact, which it was.

The outer boundary was entirely intact.

“You’ve been working on the barrier.” She moved closer, and I watched her press her own attention against the outer boundary with the practiced efficiency of someone who knew what they were checking. “You won’t find a way through it. The construction is sound.”

She looked at me. “And yet you keep working.”

She studied me for a moment with the expression she used when she was recalibrating. “You’re more like your mother than I expected,” she said. “She was the same. In similar circumstances, years ago Ju kept working.”

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify