Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 182

Chapter 182

RIVERA

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?”

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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.

“Daddy?” His voice through the door.

“Still here.”

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

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

Bianca was not in this house.

The woman downstairs was a doppelganger–built from her hair and her memories and whatever Voss’s practitioners could distill from those things into a convincing physical replacement. Good enough to fool a hospital colleague. Good enough to fool a security team. Good enough to fool me for three days.

Not good enough to fool Louis.

Because Louis paid attention to the things that couldn’t be copied from a hair sample and a memory pattern. The breathing–out sound when she held him. The way she asked questions before agreeing to changes. The specific quality of her presence that was made of everything she’d been through and everything she’d chosen and the particular way she inhabited the space she was in.

The things that made Bianca Bianca weren’t in her hair.

practical problem of physical and behavioral And Voss hadn’t known that, because Voss had been thinking about this as a replication, and she’d solved that problem well. She just hadn’t accounted for a five–year–old who’d been paying attention to the specific texture of one person’s realness for months.

Bianca was somewhere.

go She’d been taken on the road to Matthew’s house, the night I’d let her drive out alone, the night the doppelganger had come home and told me she’d sat outside and seen Mia’s car and decided not to

She’d been somewhere for four days.

I pulled out my phone.

Klaus answered before the second ring. He was awake–had probably not been sleeping, was probably still running threads from Silver Moon, because Klaus never stopped running threads until the crisis was actually resolved and this crisis was not resolved.

“Louis noticed,” I said.

Silence. Then: “Tell me.”

“The doppelganger has been with us since Silver Moon. She came back to the safe house the morning after Bianca went to see Matthew. I believed her. Louis noticed in the car in Silver Moon and waited to see if she’d become more like herself when we got

I paused. “She didn’t.”

oppelganger now?”

“She mentioned going t

her,” Klaus said immedial

“I know,” I said. “Bianca’s position

“Bianca’s position becomes si true thing rather than the co

I stood in the hallway and

Bianca was somewher which meant Bianca thought she was

“The anchor

“Almos

“The

ws you know, she signals Voss. And if she signals Voss-

ngerous,” Klaus corrected, with the precise grimness of someone saying the

here for four days. Voss had her, which meant Voss had her in the preparation site,

e operation we’d been trying to locate for four days and we hadn’t known it because we’d

know, Lucian.” His voice shifted slightly, the professional register giving way for just a moment to the

1. it. “I’m already moving. Give me thirty minutes to pull the team together and confirm the site data. Don’t do s the doppelganger.”

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

h.” Klaus’s voice was steady. The voice he used when he was grounding someone who needed grounding. “She’s been

g on getting out since the moment they put her in. You know that. Whatever is happening in that room, she has not been still.”

in any construction, about water and stone and time. out her mother’s training, about

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