Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 222

RIVERA

Louis’s room had the specific quiet of a child who had been told it was bedtime and had complied without argument, which with Louis usually meant he was either very tired or thinking about something he hadn’t decided to say yet.

Both, tonight, probably.

He was sitting on the edge of his bed in his pajamas when I knocked and pushed the door oper. His school things were already put away, which he did without being asked, a habit so consistent that I had stopped noticing it. The lamp on his nightstand was on. The dinosaurs were in their arrangement on the shelf. Everything in the room was where it was supposed to be.

He had a glass in his hand.

but showing that I had registered it. A pale liquid, slightly cloudy, in the cup he usually used for water. Not

said.

e in and sat on the edge of the

ed for it. He leaned slightly tow

I wanted to talk to you for am

He looked at me with the ste

I kept my voice easy. Casu answer. Louis was perce

him down.

“At school,” I sai

that.”

way I had sat on the edge of his bed for five years when the situation matic way he had, the body memory of a thousand bedtimes.

as his most consistent quality. “Okay.”

De when I needed him to answer without the weight of the question changing the w when he was being interrogated rather than talked to, and interrogation closed

ing you anything lately? A teacher, someone in the yard. Food, a drink, anything like

Louis sho

“Nobod

“No

qu

hat wasn’t part of your lunch?”

ly, which meant it was true. Louis did not perform honesty. He was either honest or he was ng honest.

rafter?” I said. “On the way, at pickup. Anyone you don’t know well.”

what I expected and the conversation was nearly done. Then, still in the same easy register, “Has

t lately? Something you’ve been having that you didn’t have before?”

ide me.

ness. The kind that a stranger would not have caught. I had been reading Louis’s silences for five years, the s of them, the ones that meant he was thinking and the ones that meant he was deciding, and this was the

the glass in his hands. The specific way he looked at it told me everything before he said a word.

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“Mummy gives me a drink,” he said. “And some cookies Before bed.” A pause. “She started after we got back from the other pack. She didn’t do it before.”

The room was very quiet.

I looked at the glass. Pale liquid, slightly cloudy. It looked like watered juice, the kind of thing you gave a child before bed without thinking twice about it. It looked completely ordinary.

I put my hand out. “Can I see?”

He gave it to me without hesitation. He was watching my face in the careful way that meant he was reading it, and I kept my face in the register of a man doing something ordinary, looking at a glass, nothing alarming here.

“I don’t want you to drink this tonight,” I said. “Okay? Just rest without it.”

“Is something wrong with it?”

“I want to check something,” I said. “It’s probably fine. But you’ve been tired and I want to make sure everything going into your body is exactly right.” I held his eyes. “That’s not a thing to worry about. That’s just me being careful.”

Louis looked at me for a long moment. He was deciding something, the way he decided things, which was quietly and completely.

“Okay,” he said.

I set the glass on the nightstand. Away from him.

“Lie down,” I said.

He did. I pulled the covers up and he let me, which he sometimes did and sometimes didn’t depending on whether he felt like being small that night. Tonight he let me. I sat beside him until his breathing settled into the longer rhythm of actual sleep, which took less time than usual because he was exhausted in a way that sleep came for quickly once he stopped fighting it.

When I was sure, I took the glass and left.

Roy, Elijah, and Klaus were still in the study.

They looked up when I came in. I set the glass on the table in the center of the room, away from the papers, and stood back and looked at it.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Γ

“Louis,” I said. “She’s been giving him a drink before bed. Cookies too. She started after we came back from Silver Moon.” I paused. “He had this in his hand when I went upstairs.”

Klaus leaned forward and looked at the glass without touching it. Elijah did the same. Roy had gone very still in the way he went still when something had just clicked into a larger pattern.

“The compound,” Elijah said. Not a question.

“That’s what I’m thinking,” I said.

Klaus looked at me. “How did he take it?”

“He gave me the glass without hesitation,” I said. “He’s been taking it because it comes from someone he trusts completely.” The words were harder to say than I expected them to be. I said them anyway. “And James’s blood results show a healthy child. Clean panel, nothing physical. Whatever is affecting him is magical in origin.”

The room was very quiet.

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“Satuething being administered to him regularly,” Roy said. “Something his system accepts rather than fights.”

“Yes.”

Elijah was already reaching for his kit, the case that lived under his chair in the study the way professional equipment lived close to the people who needed it reliably. He produced a small testing instrument, the kind used for magical trace identification, and held it near the glass without touching the liquid

He looked at the reading.

Then he looked at me.

“There’s something in it,” he said. “I can’t give you a full composition without a proper analysis, but it’s there. Low level. The kind of concentration you wouldn’t taste.” He set the instrument down. “The kind of concentration you could administer daily without the recipient knowing.”

I looked at the glass on my table.

I thought about Louis taking it every night because Bianca gave it to him. Because she had built something with him over months that his body treated as safe. Because a five-year-old boy who had already lost his mother once had found someone who had become his mother in every way that mattered, and he had trusted her with everything, and she had given him this.

Except she hadn’t.

That was what I was only now allowing myself to fully hold. The woman who had given Louis this drink was not Bianca. She

looked like Bianca and moved like Bianca and had said all of Bianca’s words in Bianca’s cadences, and she had been in our bed

and at our table and in our lives for weeks, and she was not Bianca.

And somewhere Bianca was not here.

I sat down because my legs made that decision before I did.

Klaus was at my side in the way he moved when something mattered, which was fast and quiet. He pulled a chair close and sat in it and put his forearms on his knees and looked at me directly

“Say it,” I said.

“The doppelganger,” he said. “It’s the only explanation that holds all of it together. The behavioral differences. The necklace we can’t place. James’s reaction this morning. The greeting she didn’t give him.” He paused. “Louis knowing something was wrong.”

“Louis told you two weeks ago,” I said.

“He did.”

“And I didn’t-”

“You didn’t have what you have now,” Klaus said. It was not absolution. It was precision. He was not in the habit of offering one when the other was more useful. “You have it now. We work with now.”

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