Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 217

Chapter 29

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Chapter 217

Chapter 217

CALLAHAN

The bag was almost packed by seven in the morning.

I had not brought much with me when Matthew hired me. A professional habit travel light, keep your kit simple, be ready to move. Two changes of clothes, a toiletry bag, my work equipment in a separate case that lived under the bed regardless of where I was sleeping. The work case took thirty seconds to close and lock. The rest took under ten minutes.

I sat on the edge of the bed when I was done and looked at the packed bag on the chair.

The guest room had been mine for three weeks. It was a good room. Clean, warm, with a window that faced the east side of the property and caught the morning light in a way that made the early starts easier, Matthew Morrison ran a well-maintained house. Everything worked. Everything was where it was supposed to be. The staff who came in three times a week were quiet and efficient and had learned within the first few days not to disturb the room without checking first.

I had been comfortable here.

That was part of the problem.

The medical team had cleared me two days ago. The wolfsbane was out of my system, confirmed by bloodwork, confirmed by the way my body felt when I moved – no drag, no shadow of the bone-deep fatigue that wolfsbane left behind when it was still working through you. The wound had closed cleanly. There would be a scar, which I had expected, and a slight stiffness in the first few minutes after I’d been still for a long time, which the physician said would resolve over the next several weeks.

I was functional.

Which meant I had no professional reason to still be here.

The personal reasons were not something I was going to examine too closely first thing in the morning. I had a policy about that.

I stood up, picked up the packed bag, and set it by the door.

The situation was not resolved.

This was what kept turning over in my head as I made coffee in the kitchen, alone in the early morning upret before the house came alive. I had been hired to protect Theo and Matthew. I had been injured doing that job. But being injured and recovering did not mean the job was done. The people who had sent men to this house in the middle of the night had not sent them accidentally. They had a target, they had intelligence about the target’s location, and they had been willing to commit to a direct operation to acquire it.

Those people were still out there.

I had my own network. Small, carefully selected, the kind of people who had been doing quiet work in various cities long enough to know how to look for things without being seen looking. I had put three of them onto a search pattern in Silver Moon and the surrounding area the week after the attack, because lying in a guest bed with a wolfsbane wound gave you a lot of time to think and I preferred to use thinking time productively.

They had come back with three locations.

Two warehouses on the industrial side of Silver Moon, past the freight yards, the kind of buildings that looked like they had been empty for years and probably had been until recently. And a basement location beneath what appeared to be a disused commercial building on the outer edge of the city, the kind of street where nobody was paying close attention to what was happening in the buildings because nobody had reason to.

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Signs of occupation. That was how my contact had put it. Recent use. Temperature differential inconsistent with empty space. Trace magical signatures that none of my people were equipped to identify precisely but which were present and recent. Someone was using those locations.

Whether that someone was connected to the people who had tried to take Theo, I didn’t know yet. It was a reasonable inference. It was not a confirmed one, and I had learned over years of this work that acting on reasonable inferences without confirmation was how people got hurt.

More hurt. How more people got hurt.

The problem was the magic.

I was a wolf. I had the strength and speed that came with it, and I had training on top of that, and in a straight physical confrontation I was comfortable with the odds in most situations. But the men who had come to this house that night had not been fighting straight. They had been using something and the compound on the blade had been raore than standard wolfsbane, and the way they had disappeared into the darkness at the edge of the property had been too clean for people running on foot.

I couldn’t walk into a magic operation with a security consultant’s toolkit and expect to come out functional.

I needed backup with the right capabilities.

Which meant calls. Which meant conversations I needed to have from somewhere with privacy and stable communication lines.

Which meant getting my equipment back to my own space and making contact with people I hadn’t spoken to in a while.

All of which meant leaving.

I heard Theo on the stairs at seven forty-five. I recognized the sound of him specifically – he had a particular rhythm going down stairs, two feet per step until the fourth one from the bottom where he always jumped, which I had noticed in the first week and which had not changed since.

He appeared in the kitchen doorway in his school uniform with his bag already on and his hair not entirely cooperating with whatever had been done to it that morning.

He looked at me.

He looked at the coffee cup in my hand.

He looked at the kitchen in the general way of someone conducting an inventory.

“You’re up early,” he said.

“I’m always up early.”

“Earlier than early,” he said. He came to the table and put his bag on a chair and sat next to it with the settled quality of someone who had decided the kitchen was their space and was generous about sharing it. “Are you leaving?”

I looked at him.

The question was direct. No performance around it, no softening. Just the question, asked with the specific steadiness of a child who had decided that getting the information was more important than protecting himself from the answer.

“I need to talk to your dad first,” I said.

Theo looked at me for a moment longer. Then he reached into his bag and took out the small dinosaur he had been carrying for the past week — a triceratops, plastic, one horn slightly chipped from an old impact. He set it on the table in front of him and looked at it instead of me.

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“Okay,” he said.

One word. All the things that could have been said around it stayed unsaid, which told me more than the word itself.

I poured him a glass of juice without being asked and set it in front of him.

He picked it up and drank some and put it down and kept looking at his dinosaur.

Matthew came down twenty minutes later and the morning got louder after that.

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