Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 205

Chapter 205

Chapter 205

RIVERA

The house felt different when she wasn’t in it.

I noticed this at seven–fifteen in the morning, standing in the kitchen with my coffee, listening to the particular quality of quiet that meant Louis was still upstairs and Bianca had already left for the market The quiet had a texture that changed depending on who was in the house and where, and the texture this morning was the specific one of a space where someone was absent who had recently been very present.

I had been noticing things like that for days.

Small things. The way she held her coffee cup had changed slightly – still both hands, still the same careful grip, but the angle was different. The way she moved through the kitchen in the mornings was the same sequence of actions but in a slightly different order. The way she looked at Louis when she thought no one was watching her look at him.

I had been telling myself these were the effects of stress. Of Silver Moon and the assembly and everything that had happened and everything she was still processing. People changed under pressure. The way they held things, the way they moved, the specific texture of how they occupied space – all of it shifted when the weight was heavy enough.

I had been telling myself this convincingly enough that I had mostly believed it.

Mostly.

The part of me that didn’t quite believe it was the same part that had caught her hand last night, before she reached toward Louis. The action had been automatic – I had seen her reaching and something in me had said wait without fully explaining why. And she had withdrawn her hands with the right amount of reluctance, and she had said if you’re sure in exactly the right tone, and everything about it was right.

Almost everything.

I drank my coffee and looked out the window at the garden.

Louis had eaten breakfast this morning. Less than usual, but he had eaten, and he had been upright rather than lying down, which I was counting as progress. He had taken his medication with the focused compliance of someone who had decided that getting better was a project he was managing. He had gone to school with his bag over both shoulders and his red water bottle in his hand and a list of things he needed to tell Daniel.

He had looked pale.

I was probably overthinking the pale. Louis had always been pale – it was part of his baseline, the specific quality of someone whose magical system had been compromised young and whose physical presentation reflected that. He was pale when he was well. He was paler when he was unwell. The

difference between those two states was something I had spent five years learning to read, and right now what I was reading was the second one, but not alarmingly so.

She had said his system was resilient. She had said he would be better tomorrow, and tomorrow was today, and he was upright and eating and going to school.

She knew his body better than I did. She had been working with him for months before we were even together, had built an understanding of his specific magical condition that went beyond what any of the other practitioners had managed. She knew what the healing could and couldn’t do, when it was the right

intervention and when it was better to let the body manage on its own.

She had said too much healing when he was depleted could destabilize rather than support.

She was right. She was the doctor. She was the curse–breaker. She knew.

I was overthinking.

I poured more coffee and took it to the study, where I had work to do that I’d been letting accumulate while I spent too much time watching my son sleep and my partner exist in a way that was slightly off in ways I couldn’t name.

Klaus arrived at ten with Elijah and Roy, which was the configuration of a working meeting rather than a social visit. Roy had his document folder, which he always brought and which had gotten thicker over the past week as the investigation produced more material that was interesting and less material that was actionable.

I made more coffee because the house ran on it, and we settled in the study around the table that had become our working surface. 1

“Tell me something useful,” I said,

Klaus looked at Elijah. Elijah looked at his notes. Roy looked at his folder.

The specific sequence told me the answer before any of them spoke.

“The secondary location,” Elijah said. “Clean. We’ve had eyes on it for three days. No movement, no active magical signatures, no thermal activity. Whatever it was or wasn’t, it’s not currently operational.”

“The primary site,” I said. “The blind spot.”

“We ran a careful approach yesterday,” Elijah said. “Limited team, cautious. The location Voss’s people had been using seventeen kilometers out.” He paused. “Signs of recent occupation. Recent being relative – within the last week or two. But cleared. Professionally cleared. Nothing left that gives us location of current operations.”

“She moved,” I said.

“She moved,” Klaus confirmed.

2/3

2

35

pg dn

enter

4:26 Bonus

i sat back in my chair. The window behind the table showed the garden, the unswept leaves that I still hadn’t gotten to, the grey of another autumn morning that hadn’t decided what it wanted to be.

“What about Thorne? I said

Roy took something from his folder. “Still in his position at the Alpha King’s office. Attending meetings, managing administrative functions, completely unremarkable professional behavior.” He set the document on the table a summary of Thorne’s recent activity, neat and thorough in Roy’s particular way “I have nothing that connects him to the attack on Theo Morrison’s home. Nothing that places him in communication with Voss during or after the assembly. Nothing that constitutes evidence of coordination.”

“We know he’s coordinating,” I said.

“We believe he’s coordinating,” Roy corrected, with the careful precision that was his most consistent quality. “The circumstantial case is strong. The evidential case is not.”

I looked at Klaus. “Can we bring him in?”

Klaus was quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of someone deciding what to say. The quiet of someone who had already decided and was giving me a moment before he said it.

“We can,” he said, “I have the authority as Alpha King to detain someone on credible security grounds. I don’t need a full evidential case for a holding action.” He paused. “But Rivera-”

“He walks out,” I said.

“He walks out,” Klaus confirmed. “Without enough to formally charge him, I can hold him for perhaps forty -eight hours before the legal framework requires release. And when he walks out-”

“He knows we’re onto him,” I said. “He knows the full extent of what we suspect. He goes directly to Voss with that information.”

Comments