Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 181

Chapter 181

Rivera POV

And I had sat across a kitchen table from a woman who wasn’t Bianca and told myself I was tired.

My son had known in Silver Moon.

I’d known something was wrong tonight and had explained it away.

The wrongness I’d felt at the kitchen table–the absence of the particular gravity that existed between Bianca and me, the thing that was made of time and honesty and the specific history of two people who had seen each other clearly. The absence of the breathing–out sound when she’d held Louis at the end of his bath.

I hadn’t known what I was feeling. Louis had known exactly what he was feeling and had named it with the precision of someone who’d been paying close attention to the right things.

I put my hand on his shoulder. He was tense under it–the tension of a child who’d been carrying something too heavy for several days and was waiting to find out if the adult could take some of the weight.

“You did right,” I said. “Telling me.”

“Is Mummy okay?” he asked.

The question was the question. The one that everything else was in service of. The one I didn’t have an answer to yet.

“I’m going to find out,” I said.

He looked at me for a moment, and I could see him deciding whether that was enough. Deciding whether he could hand this to me and trust that I would take it properly.

“Okay,” he said.

“I need you to do something for me,” I said. “Lock your door. The button on the inside of the handle–push it in and turn it. It’ll lock. Don’t open it for anyone except me. Not until I come back and knock three times and say it’s me.”

He sat up. “Why?”

“Because I want to make sure you’re safe while I figure out what’s going on.”

“Is the lady downstairs dangerous?”

I thought about how to answer that.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I want you safe while I find out. Can you do that for me?”

He nodded. Already swinging his legs off the bed, already moving to the door with the serious efficiency of a child. who’d been given a task he understood was important.

“Three knocks,” he said. “And you say it’s you.”

“Exactly that,” I said.

I watched him lock the door. Heard the click of it.

1/3

alt

Chaptonal

“Daddy?” His voice through the door.

“Still here.”

“Find her,” he said. “Find the real Muminy.”

I stood in the hallway outside his locked door and breathed for a moment.

Bianca was not in this house.

“I know,” I said. “Bianca’s position changes.”

“Bianca’s position becomes significantly more dangerous,” Klaus corrected, with the precise grimness of someone saying the true thing rather than the comfortable version.

alt

I stood in the hallway and processed that.

Bianca was somewhere. Had been somewhere for four days. Voss had her, which meant Voss had her in the preparation site, which meant Bianca had been inside the operation we’d been trying to locate for four days and we hadn’t known it because we’d thought she was standing next to us.

“The anchor sites,” I said. “The preparation site Roy identified. That’s where she is.”

“Almost certainly,” Klaus said.

“Then we know where she is.”

“We have a probable location based on incomplete data,” Klaus said. “It’s not the same as knowing. And going in without complete data-”

“Klaus.” My voice came out quieter than I intended. “She’s been there for four days. The ritual window is—”

“I know,” he said. “I know, Lucian.” His voice shifted slightly, the professional register giving way for just a moment to the person underneath it. “I’m already moving. Give me thirty minutes to pull the team together and confirm the site data. Don’t do anything that alerts the doppelganger.”

“What do I do for thirty minutes?”

“Go back downstairs,” he said. “Sit in your kitchen. Talk to the thing at your table like you don’t know what it is. Give Bianca the time she needs without tipping Voss off that we’re coming.”

I looked at Louis’s locked door.

“Three knocks,” I said, to myself more than to Klaus. “And say it’s me.’

“Lucian.” Klaus’s voice was steady. The voice he used when he was grounding someone who needed grounding. She’s been working on getting out since the moment they put her in. You know that. Whatever is happening in that room, she has not been sitting still.”