Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 210

Chapter 216

Chapter 210

Chapter 210

BIANCA

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The ceiling had a crack in it.

I had been looking at it long enough that I knew every part of it. It started near the left corner, thin as a thread at the beginning, and then widened as it moved toward the center, splitting buto two smaller lines before it reached the light fixture. The fixture itself was a single bulb behind a metal cage, the kind meant to last a long time without being changed. It was always on. I had not seen darkness since they moved me to this room.

That was how I measured time now. Not by day or night, because there were no windows. By meals, which came twice a day, small and inadequate and pushed through a slot in the door without ceremony. By the visits, which came once a day, regular as a clock, always the same unhurried footsteps in the corridor before the door opened.

By the specific quality of pain that told me whether it had been twelve hours since the last session or twenty-four.

I had been here for weeks. I knew this because I had meant more than three weeks even accounting

d been counting meals, and the count was now somewhere past forty, which the days early on when I had been too disoriented to count reliably. The electrical trap at the first door had done something to my nervous system that had taken several days to resolve, a full-body sensitivity that made everything feel like a bruise. I had come back from it slowly, in the way you come back from something that has gotten into the wiring of you rather than just the surface.

The straps were leather and thick, one across my chest, one across my hips, one across my thighs, and individual restraints at each wrist and ankle. They had been fitted by someone who knew what they were doing. There was no slack. I had tested every point of contact in the first three days, methodically and without urgency, the way my mother had taught me to assess a situation before committing to an action. The left wrist restraint had the smallest amount of give – not enough to matter, but I noted it the way I noted everything. Because information was the only resource I had.

The room was stone, like the first one. The table I was strapped to was metal, slightly inclined so that I was at an angle rather than fully horizontal. There was a tray on a stand to the right that held things I had decided early on not to look at directly. There was a drain in the floor.

I looked at the ceiling crack and I breathed and I counted.

She came every day at what I estimated was mid-morning.

The footsteps were always hers. I had learned the sound of them the way you learn the sounds of a place you cannot leave involuntarily and completely, until the pattern of them existed in me like something built rather than learned. Unhurrie. Even. The footsteps of someone who had nowhere to be except exactly where she was going.

Miriam Voss was not what I had pictured when I first heard her name.

sharp,

I had pictured someone harder. Someone whose appearance matched the architecture of what she had built institutional, cold in the specific way of someone who had excised feeling from themselves as a practical measure. What she actually looked like was a woinan in her late sixties with grey hair kept neatly back and the kind of face that in different circumstances you might have trusted. Intelligent eyes. Deliberate hands. The particular quality of someone who had been working toward something for so long that the work had become indistinguishable from who they were.

She pulled the chair from the corner and sat beside the table and looked at me the way a doctor looks at a patient whose chart they know by memory.

I looked at the ceiling.

“You ate this morning,” she said.

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I didn’t answPT

“That’s good. Your body needs to maintain baseline function.” She said this without warmth and without cruelty. Informational “We are not interested in your deterioration. We are interested in your blood.”

I had stopped responding to the opening remarks several days in. Not as a strategy, exactly. More because the energy it took to form words felt like a resource I needed to conserve for other things.

“Lucian Rivera,” she said, which was what she did when she wanted my attention and the clinical framing hadn’t produced it. I kept looking at the ceiling

“He hasn’t come,” she said. “You’ve been gone for weeks and he hasn’t come. I want you to think about what that means.”

“It means your doppelganger is functional,” I said. My voice was rougher than it used to be. Dryness, and something else.

“It means she is excellent,” Voss said, with the specific satisfaction of someone discussing work they are proud of. “I have been building her for over a year. The hair was easy – you leave it everywhere, which is a useful habit in someorie we intended to acquire. The memories were more complex. But we had access to enough of your history to construct a convincing architecture.” She paused. “He looks at her and sees you. He touches her and feels you. She uses your words in your cadences and he believes it

entirely.”

I breathed.

“He is not suspicious,” she said. “He is not looking. The investigation has, as of four days ago, reduced its urgency considerably. They believe I may have abandoned the ritual window. They believe they are winning.” She let that sit for a moment. “He is at home, Rivera, with his son and the woman he thinks is you, and he is not coming.”

The crack in the ceiling went from left to center and split into two.

“Your curse-breaker network contact,” she continued. “Vera. She is recovering well at his house, according to our information. She has provided him with considerable intelligence about the ritual and about me, most of which is accurate and none of which helps him find this location.” Another pause. “My doppelganger has been redirecting the investigation carefully. Not obviously. Small adjustments to the direction of inquiry. A misremembered detail here, a subtly wrong inference there. Nothing that raises suspicion. Everything that costs them time.”

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