Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 213

Chapter 213

Chapter 213

BIANCA

All of that was probably true. The footage plan was real. Rivera’s response to it would be exactly what she predicted, berny was intelligent and she had spent considerable time studying him. The exile was real, or worse than exile.

I gave myself the full ten minutes and then I stopped.

The left wrist restraint had the smallest amount of give.

I had been working on it every day for two weeks, in the hours between her visits and meals, in the slow careful way of someone with nothing but time and a very clear objective. Not pulling against it, which accomplished nothing except bruising, Rotating. The specific motion of working leather at its weakest point, at the stitching where the two layers met, at the place where the buckle’s edge had, over a long period of consistent pressure, begun to create a crease in the material that was fractionally deeper than it had been the week before.

Today the crease was deeper than yesterday.

I worked on it steadily, without hurry, the way my mother had taught me to approach a complicated curse. Not with the energy of someone desperate to be done. With the energy of someone who understood that the work was the work and that it would take the time it took and that panic shortened nothing except your own endurance.

The leather was not going to hold forever.

Voss had said she was very thorough. She had been thorough with the electrical trap. She had been thorough with the doppelganger and the compound in Louis’s drink and the surveillance footage and the plan to destroy my life even after she was finished with my body. She had been thorough with fifteen years of patience and careful construction.

But the left wrist restraint had been fitted by someone other than her.

And the stitching had a weak point at the third hole from the buckle.

And I had been working on it for two weeks with nothing to do except be thorough.

She had told me that nobody was coming. That the only way I was getting out of this room was if Rivera or Matthew had an epiphany and somehow stumbled upon this location, which she had designed to be unfindable.

She was probably right about that too.

So I was not going to wait for an epiphany.

I rotated my wrist again, slow and steady, feeling the crease in the leather catch and hold and stretch by the amount it stretched, which was a small amount. The same small amount it had stretched yesterday. The same small amount that, accumulated over days, had produced a weakness where there had not been one before.

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

Three days.

The final procedure in two.

The leather was not going to hold forever, and I had been thorough too, and I was my mother’s daughter, and Miriam Voss had made one mistake in all of her careful planning

Chapter

I called James Wright on a Tuesday.

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I did it from the study with the door closed, which was a habit I had developed over the past weeks for calls I didn’t want to explain. The study had good acoustics for privacy thick walls, one window that faced the garden rather than the street, and a door that sealed properly when pulled all the way shut.

James picked up on the third ring with the specific energy of someone who was already in the middle of three things.

“Rivera,” he said. “This is unexpected.”

“I need a favor,” I said. “The kind that doesn’t get written down.”

A short pause. James Wright had known me long enough to understand that when I said something like that, it was worth hearing out. “Go on.”

“Louis,” I said. “He’s been unwell for about two weeks. Fatigue, reduced appetite, pallor beyond his baseline. Bianca has been managing his care and her assessment is that his system is depleted from a curse activation and that rest is the correct intervention.”

“But,” James said.

“I want a second opinion,” I said. “Without Bianca knowing I asked for one.”

2

Another pause, longer this time. James was not someone who made quick judgments about complicated requests. It was one of the things that made him good at his job and occasionally slow at social functions. “Rivera, if Bianca is already on this—”

“I’m not questioning her competence,” I said. “I’m asking for standard medical practice. Second opinion, independent assessment. If she’s right, you’ll tell me she’s right and I’ll have more confidence. If there’s something she’s missed because she’s managing too much at once, I want to know before it matters.”

“And you don’t want her to know.”

“Not until I have your findings,” I said. “After that, I’ll handle it however I need to.”

the specific ambient sound of a James was quiet for a moment. I could hear something in the background of wherever he was hospital corridor, the kind you stopped noticing after the first year but which was unmistakable from outside it.

“I’ll come as a visit,” he said finally. “Social. I’ve been meaning to check on you anyway. Anyone asks, I was in the area and I’na bored.”

“I’ll tell Louis it’s a friend coming by,” I said.

“Does Louis know about the second opinion?”

I thought about Louis at the breakfast table, the considered look he had given me before getting into the school car. “He’ll figure it out,” I said. “He always does.”

“Alright,” James said. “Tomorrow morning. Ten o’clock. Have coffee ready because I’m not doing this without coffee.”

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