Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 223

Chapter 223

Chapter 223

RIVERA

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I looked at the glass.

n gone for weeks,” I said. The shape of it arrived all at once. Not as a thought but as a physical thing, weight and

multaneously, the unders slightly wrong and told

a missed connection ation while a replacem

Rivera,” Klaus said.

“She is in a room som

ritual window-”

“Closes in approx softening, becau

Forty-eight

“Then w

g of what had been happening in this house while I watched it happen and saw was overthinking. “She was taken before she reached Matthew. That was never a car she made. Someone took her. And we have been sitting here losing the thread of the my house and put something in my son’s drink every night”

ught now. Tonight.” I stood up because sitting was not possible anymore. “And the

hours,” Roy said. He said it the way he said difficult things, which was directly and without

ening was a form of disrespect.

urs,” I said.

eople identified,” Elijah said immediately. “In Silver Moon. The warehouses and the basement site.”

Tonight.” I looked at Klaus. “And Thorne.”

e pull last,” Klaus said. “If we move on him too early-”

how.” I pressed my hand flat against the table and breathed. “We pull it carefully. But we pull it.”

I said. “I need to-” I stopped. There was a sentence at the end of that I didn’t finish because I didn’t need to.

needed the hour for.

stairs was not Bianca.

ck upstairs.

Som door was slightly open.

me from within, the warm light of the lamp on the dresser that Bianca kept on in the evenings, which was one of her had absorbed without thinking, the way you absorbed the habits of people you lived with until you could not remember ones had been yours first.

ed the door open.

as changing into her night things, her back to me, and t

in the ornate silver setting. The chain Ih

d it for a moment.

ved into the room and

r the clasp.

caught the necklace at the back of her neck. The dark

this morning.

Chapter

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She spun.

The speed of it was wrong. H was Taster than a person reaching for something fragile. It was the speed of someone who had been waiting for a threat and has categorized this as one.

Her hand came up and gripped my wrist. Hard. Her eyes had the specific quality I had been cataloguing for weeks without being willing to name it, and up close, in the lamp light, with her hand around my wrist and her body between me and the necklace, I could see it clearly for the first time.

Not Bianca’s eyes. Bianca’s face, Bianca’s hands, Bianca’s body, but the thing behind the eyes was not the thing I had loved for

months.

“What are you doing,” she said.

“Helping you,” I said. My voice came out steady, which cost something. “You were wearing it to sleep. I was going to unclasp it for you.”

She looked at me. The calculation behind the eyes was fast and I watched it happen. She adjusted.

“It’s staying on,” she said.

“It’s not comfortable to sleep in-”

“It’s staying on.” Her voice had shifted into something that was performing an emotion. Indignation, I thought. The shape of it was right but the weight was off. “You’ve always had a problem with anything from my past. Haven’t you. You see me wearing something from before and you can’t leave it alone. You want to take it. You want to take the last thing I have from my family.”

I looked at her.

The real Bianca had told me once, in the early months, about her marriage. Not everything, but some of it. She had told me with the specific precision of someone who had processed it enough to speak about it without flinching, and she had not been fragile about it. She had been clear. She knew what it had cost her and she was not interested in performing victimhood about it.

The woman in front of me was performing it now. Constructing a version of Bianca’s history and wearing it as a defense.

I stepped back.

“That’s not what I was doing,” I said.

“Then what were you doing, Lucian.” She used my first name the way Bianca rarely did, which was only in serious moments, but the cadence was slightly wrong, a fraction of a beat off. “Because from where I’m standing, you waited until my back was turned and reached for the one thing I’ve worn today that you didn’t put on me.”

“I was trying to help you be comfortable,” I said.

She picked up the pillow from her side of the bed. The movement was decisive and contained and had the quality of something that had been prepared. “I’m sleeping in the guest room.”

“Bianca-

11

“I’m tired, Lucian.” The exhaustion in her voice was real, I noted. But it was the exhaustion of someone performing a long role, not of someone who had been hurt by someone they loved. “I’m tired and I’m sad and I would like one night where I’m not being managed.”

She moved past me toward the door.

I let her go.

I stood in the bedroom with the lamp still on and listened to her footsteps move down the hallway to the guest room, and I listened to the guest room door close, and I stood in the quiet that followed and breathed.

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The necklace.

She had not let me touch t

She had not let me anywhere near it.

I thought about what Klaus had said once, in a different context, about doppelgangers and the things that tethered them. The magical architecture that held the construction together. How a complex working of that kind needed an anchor. Something physical, something worn or carried, that the magic returned to when it needed to stabilize.

The necklace.

I sat on the edge of the bed and I looked at the lamp and I thought about Bianca in a room somewhere in the dark, and I thought about Louis asleep down the hall with no drink in his hand tonight, and I thought about forty-eight hours.

I picked up my phone and texted Klaus.

*The necklace is the anchor. Don’t let her leave the house with it.*

The reply came in under a minute.

*Understood. We move at dawn.*

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