Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 198

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Chapter 198

Chapter 198

FAKE BIANCA

The Louis thread was requiring adjustment.

He was getting weaker faster than I had anticipated, which meant either the dosage was slightly high or the absence of the healing work was accelerating the compound’s effects more than Voss had modeled. Either way, the current trajectory was moving faster than the timeline required.

I reduced the dose on the fourth day.

I did it carefully, the same way I did everything carefully, the same precision that eleven years of this work had built into me. The difference between the fourth-day dose and the previous days’ doses was small enough that the rate of change would slow without stopping, which was what was needed.

Voss had said we need him functional. I was keeping him functional.

I continued to sit with him in the afternoons. The book, the couch, the careful proximity that Rivera needed to see and that Louis had stopped responding to with the extra-beat frown, which I was choosing to interpret as adaptation rather than suspicion. He was quiet beside me, self-contained, playing with his dinosaurs or looking out the window, and I was quiet too, and we occupied the same space with the specific texture of two people who had been close and were less close now and were managing the distance without naming it.

Once, he had leaned slightly toward me while I was reading. Not a full lean

not the complete boneless trust of how he

apparently used to position himself against her. Just a small movement, a few centimeters, his shoulder angling slightly in my direction.

I had been aware of it and had not responded to it and after a moment he had straightened again.

I had filed this under things to monitor rather than things to act on.

On the fifth day, I sat in the study again during the afternoon briefing, with my book and my coffee, and I listened to Klaus and Roy discussing the surveillance data from the secondary location.

Nothing. As Voss had said.

“Clean site,” Elijah said, the frustration in his voice professionally managed but present. “No active signatures, no recent magical work, no thermal activity consistent with habitation. If it was ever a preparation site, it hasn’t been used recently.”

“She moved,” Rivera said.

“Or we were wrong about the connection,” Roy said, with the reluctance of someone whose hypothesis had not performed as expected. “The registration document is real and the family connection to Voss is real, but perhaps the operational use was historical rather than current.”

“Or she knew we were looking,” Klaus said.

A pause in the room. I turned a page of my book.

“How would she know we were looking?” Rivera asked.

Another pause. Shorter.

“She has resources we haven’t fully mapped,” Klaus said. “Surveillance capabilities, information sources. She’s been operating in the shadows for fifteen years and staying ahead of every attempt to locate her. It’s not impossible that she has visibility into our investigation approach.”

I turned another page.

“The primary site,” Rivera said. “Elijah’s thermal imaging from ten days ago Six people. We never confirmed whether that was the ritual preparation site of a meeting location”

“We couldn’t get close enough to confirm,” Elijah said

“What if we tried again?” Rivera said “Not remote monitoring Closer. Physical approach, limited team, careful ”

1 looked up from my book

“The risk of alerting her Roy started.

“Is the same risk we’re already running,” Rivera said. “If she knows we’re looking, passive surveillance isn’t protecting us from that We need to actually find where she is.” He looked at Klaus. “Physical approach. Small team. Tell me why that’s wrong”

Klaus was looking at the map on the table. He was thinking in the specific way he thought when the decision was significant and he was being thorough about it

“The blind spot,” he said, after a moment. “The gap between our monitoring perimeter and Silver Moon’s security. That’s where she was positioned when we last had reliable location data. If she’s moved the preparation work but stayed in the same general area

**

“She’s in the blind spot,” Rivera said.

“It’s possible,” Klaus said.

“Then we go into the blind spot,” Rivera said.

This was the conversation I needed to redirect.

I looked up from my book with the expression of someone who has been listening while appearing not to. “Can I say something?

** I asked

Rivera looked at me. “Of course,”

“The blind spot,” I said. “If she knows you’ve identified it as a gap in coverage if she has the surveillance capability Klaus mentioned then staying in the blind spot is exactly what she’d want you to think she’s doing. Because you can’t monitor it easily, which means you’d have to commit to a physical approach, which means exposing people and resources and approach vectors that she could use to plan against you.” I paused. “If I were her, I’d seed the blind spot with something just significant enough to draw you in. And then I’d be somewhere else entirely.”

The room was quiet

Rivera was looking at me with an expression I read carefully and determined was not suspicion but rather the expression of someone hearing something they’re taking seriously.

“So you think the blind spot is a decoy,” Klaus said.

“I think it might be worth considering,” I said, and returned to my book.

The conversation continued, but differently

the physical approach to the blind spot now complicated by the possibility I had introduced, the certainty that had been building in Rivera redirected into consideration, Klaus and Roy and Elijah all now

running versions of the question I’d raised.

I read my book and listened and turned pages at appropriate intervals.

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