Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 211

Chapter 211

Chapter 211

BIANCA

I said nothing.

“The boy,” she said then.

I turned my head and looked at her. I had trained myself not to react to most of what she said, but she knew the words that still got through. She had been refining her list of them for weeks.

“Louis,” she said. “He has been receiving something daily in his drink. A sensitizing compound. Not harmful in the amounts administered. But by the time we need him, his magical channels will be prepared in a way that makes the extraction significantly more efficient.” She looked at me with the even expression she used for everything. “Your replacement administers it every morning. He takes it without question because he trusts her. Because he trusts you.”

I looked back at the ceiling.

“You want to say something,” she said.

s selecting carefull

I wanted to say a great many things. I was

“He’ll notice,” I said. “Louis notices everything.”

“He has noticed that something is different,” Voss agree Roy. That is the full extent of the investigation that Louis’s year-old’s unease is not the same as evidence.”

I breathed. In through the nose, out through the mouth

somewhere I couldn’t come back from.

“And then there is the Silver Moon situation,” she said.

I didn’t turn my head.

pleasantly. “He mentioned it to Klaus. Klaus told him to stay close to erception has produced.” She folded her hands in her lap. “A five-

hythm I had been using to keep myself from going

“I had one of my people pull footage this morning,” she said. “From a market in Silver Moon territory. I thought you might fint it useful. For context.”

I heard the sound of something being set on the tray beside me. A device of some kind, the tap of it against the metal surface. “I’m going to hold it where you can see it,” she said. “I’m not asking you to look. But you may want to.” [

I looked at the ceiling for a long moment.

Then I looked.

The footage was clear.

That was the first thing I noticed, the clinical part of my brain cataloguing before the rest of me could catch up. Whoever had taken it had good equipment, a high angle, probably a camera positioned to look like something else. The market was busy, a weekend morning by the quality of the crowd, the kind of ordinary Saturday that had continued existing while I was strapped to a metal table in a stone room.

Matthew was pushing the cart.

present. That was what was different. The Matthew I had been He looked I searched for the right word and found it married to for four years had always had a quality of being slightly elsewhere, even in the same room, a portion of his attention

Chapter 2

+25 Bonus

perpetually reserved for something I was not part of. The man pushing the cart in the footage had both feet in the moment he was it. He was watching the other two, and his expression was the expression of someone who was mildly exasperated and not at all unhappy about it.

Theo was in the cart.

He was sitting in the front section where small children sat, the one with the leg holes, which he was probably getting too big for but had apparently negotiated successfully. He had his arms crossed over the cart’s front bar and he was talking with the focused energy of someone making a very important argument. I knew that posture. I knew the specific set of his shoulders when he had decided something mattered and was going to make sure the relevant adults understood why.

The man beside the cart was listening to him.

I

He was tall, with the build of someone whose profession required it, and he was leaning slightly toward Theo in the way people leaned when they were genuinely listening rather than waiting for a child to finish. He picked something off the shelf couldn’t see what – and held it up, and Theo’s arms uncrossed and he pointed it and said something, and the man looked at the object and then put it back and picked up a different one, and Theo pointed again, and Matthew said something from behind the cart and both the man and Theo turned and appeared to respond simultaneously, which produced a brief three-way exchange that ended with Matthew putting something in the cart with the specific energy of someone who had lost the argument and accepted it.

Theo laughed.

It was a real laugh. I knew all of his laughs, the performed one he used when he thought something was expected of him, the polite one, the surprised one. This was the real one, the one that came from the middle of him, the one that meant something had actually reached him.

I watched my son laugh in a market on a Saturday morning and I breathed through it.

Voss let the footage play for another thirty seconds before she lowered the device.

“His name is Callahan,” she said. “He was hired as a security consultant after the incident at the school. He was injured defending the boy from our people.” She said this without any apparent acknowledgment of the fact that her people had been the ones trying to take my son. “He has been living in the Morrison house during his recovery. The pack has been talking, as packs do. The general understanding in Silver Moon is that Alpha Morrison and the consultant have formed an attachment of some kind.”

I kept my breathing even.

” “Theo has been observed asking for Callahan specifically at school pickup,” she continued. “He tells his classmates about him. He has apparently begun resisting the end of the arrangement.” She tilted her head slightly. “He is moving ca, Bianca. He was always going to. He was four years old when you left. Children adapt. They find new anchors.”

I looked at the ceiling.

“He called Callahan by a shortened name,” she said. “Cal. In the footage, if you had been able to hear the audio. Cal, not Callahan. Cal, with the specific ease of a name that has already become familiar.” She paused. “Your son gave him a pet name. The same way children give them to people they’ve decided belong to them.”

Comments

Support

Share