Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 218

Chapter 218

Chapter 218

CALLAHAN

Matthew’s office was on the second floor of the main pack building, a thirty minutes walk from the house He had offered me a car but I walked it, the way I walked most things when I was trying to think, because movement helped the thinking happen in the right order.

The morn

time, th

though

s cold and clear. Silver Moon territory in autumn had a specific quality of light – flat and bright at the same at made everything look more defined than it did in summer. I walked with my hands in my jacket pockets and e three locations and the calls I needed to make and the conversation I was about to have.

atthew about the locations yet.

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ing until I was clearer on what I had. A security consultant who brings incomplete intelligence to a client without was worse than one who brought nothing – it created pressure without action direction, which was how made badly. I wanted to be able to say here is what we have and here is what I think we should do about it, not here ng vague and alarming, good luck.

ad enough to have the conversation.

ack building was busy at this hour. Morning operations, administrative work, the specific organized activity of a large s daily management. I had been in the building enough times in the past three weeks to know the layout and the staff and ghly who did what. People nodded at me in the hallways. I had become a known quantity, which in security work was a mixed tcome – useful for access, less ideal for observation.

went up the main staircase to the second floor.

Matthew’s office was at the end of the corridor, past the administrative suite and the two smaller offices that belonged to his senior operational staff. The corridor was wide and well-lit, and at this hour it had the steady traffic of people moving between spaces with purpose.

I was about fifteen meters from Matthew’s office door when I saw the man coming out of it.

I stopped.

Not a dramatic stop. A small one, the kind that looked like someone pausing to check something in a pocket. A habit from work

when something registers, you don’t show it immediately. You take the action of a second you need to decide what you’re looking at before you let your face confirm that you’ve seen it.

I was looking at a man in his mid-forties, well-dressed in the specific way of someone attached to a formal institutional office. Good coat, professional bearing, the careful presentation of someone who moved through important spaces regularly and had

learned to look like he belonged in them.

I had seen him before.

Not clearly. The night of the attack had been dark, and I had been managing several things at once, and the man I was remembering had been at the edge of the property rather than in the middle of it. He had not been one of the ones who came through the door. He had been standing further back, near the tree line, and he had been on a phone, and when things had gone wrong for the people they sent in, he had moved away and disappeared into the darkness faster than the others.

I had logged him as a person of interest and then had other things to deal with and the memory had gone into the category of things to revisit.

I was revisiting it now.

He walked past me in the

his movement that sa

ward and his pace was even and there was nothing in hadn’t recognized me, or he had recognized me

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and was much better at this than average.

I watched hitn reach the stairs and go down them.

I stood at Matthew’s office door and watched the space where he had been

The door opened before I knocked.

Matthew was there, which meant he had seen me through the window that faced the corridor, or one of his staff had told him I was coming, or he had some other awareness of his immediate environment that I had not fully mapped yet. He had the quality this morning of someone who had already been working for two hours and was comfortable with that.

He put his hand on my shoulder.

It was a brief contact, the specific kind between people who had been through something together and had landed on an understanding that didn’t need a lot of words around it. I had not expected to develop that kind of understanding with a client in three weeks. I had developed it anyway.

“You look like you’re about to tell me something I’m not going to enjoy,” he said.

I looked back at the stairs.

“Who was that?” I said.

Matthew followed my eyes.

“Who?”

“The man who just left your office.”

Matthew’s expression settled into something more attentive. “Thorne. He’s attached to the Alpha King’s office. Administrative liaison, coordinates the communication between pack territories and the central office.” He paused. “He’s been through here a few times in the past month. Standard operational coordination. Why?”

I looked at the empty staircase for another moment.

The thing about a reasonable inference was that it had to be handled carefully. A wrong accusation against someone with institutional backing caused a specific kind of damage that was difficult to undo. I had been in this work long enough to know that the feeling of recognizing someone was not the same as confirmed identification, especially in the conditions I had been operating under that night.

But the feeling was strong.

“Cal,” Matthew said. “Talk to me.”

”

I turned back to him. “I need to come inside.”

His office was large by practical necessity rather than preference. I had been in it before and had noticed that it was furnished for function rather than impression. The kind of space that showed you what the person in it was actually for.

He closed the door.

I stood in the middle of the room for a moment, organizing what I had into the right order.

“The night I was injured,” I said. “There were multiple people. The ones who came through the door were the main contact two of them, the third covering the back. But there was another one. At the edge of the property, near the tree line. He didn’t come in. He was on a phone, or a communication device of some kind. He left when it became clear the operation was failing.” Matthew was listening with the complete attention he brought to things that mattered. He had gone still in the way of someone who had learned that being still helped him hear more accurately.

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“I didn’t get a clean look at him that night,” I said. “It was dark and I had other things to manage. But I logged him. The way he stood. The way he moved. The quality of his presence at the edge of things, managing rather than participating ” I stopped. That was Thorne.”

安

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Chapter 314