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?”

+25 Bonus

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

“There’s a provision that could be used to challenge the Blackthorn line’s Alpha claim,” I said. “Under certain interpretations It’s not nentable the language is ambiguous and a careful presentation of the invocation could avoid triggering it. But it’s there. I kept me voice even. “I don’t know enough about High Council procedure to know how likely it is that someone world

try to use it that war

Javier was very still in the specific way he went still when he was processing something significant. “You’re saying the document you need to remove Clarissa could also destabilize Kael.”

“Under the wrong interpretation. With the wrong advocate making the argument.” Theld his eyes. “I need to understand rise High Council procedure before I use it. And I need to understand whose interests might push toward that interpretation and how much leverage they’d have.”

The ironwood line,” he said immediately.

I stared at him

“The third signatory bloodline,” he said. “The dissolved pack. If they still have representatives with legal standing, the most to gain from a High Council review of all three bloodlines‘ claims

because the Ironwood line dissolved, so then

covenant claims were held in abeyance. A full review reopens those claims.” He met my eyes. “How did you know about the

Tamwood

6

***The document names them. And the seals.” I looked at him. “You know about the Covenant”

“I know about it the way you know about something you heard once from someone who knew someone.

the beta level, years ago. An old legal instrument from the founding era that had been used a few times bom pa

I never knew the specifics.” He paused. “I knew the founding date removal was connected to it. Or suspend

“Did Kael

*

“No Flat and certain. “He doesn’t know the Covenant exists. His father didn’t mention it

scrubbing happened twenty–five years ago, before Kael was old enough to be told pack history in any mal NSE.

I filed that. The timeline of the scrubbing, which put it approximately five years into larissa &

for her to assess the landscape, to understand what records existed and where, to bargit the G