Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 226

Chapter 226

RIVERA

I found the guest room empty at five fifty-three in the morning.

I knew the time precisely because I had looked at my phone when I came upstairs, a habit from a night that had not involved much sleep. I had been in the study with Klaus and Roy and Elijah until past two, working through what we had and what it meant and what the next step required, and then I had come upstairs and lain on my side of the bed in the dark and looked at the ceiling and thought about Bianca in a room somewhere and the forty-eight hours that were becoming forty and then thirty- eight and then less.

At five fifty I got up.

I went to the guest room because Klaus had said don’t let her leave the house with the necklace and I needed to know she was still there before the house started moving and the morning made everything harder to control.

The door was open.

Not ajar. Open. The way a door looked when someone had left through it without caring about the sound of it closing behind them because they were already gone and the sound didn’t matter anymore.

The bed had been slept in. The covers were pulled back on one side, the pillow displaced. Her phone was not on the nightstand. The coat that had been on the chair when I passed the door at midnight was not on the chair.

I stood in the doorway for three seconds.

Then I went back downstairs.

Klaus was already in the study. He had not slept either, which had known without needing to check, because Klaus in a crisis had not slept properly in five years and one more night made no difference to a pattern that was already established.

He looked at my face when I came through the door.

“She’s gone,” I said.

He stood up. “When.”

“I don’t know. The bed was used. Sometime before six.” I looked at Elijah, who was already at his equipment. “The monitoring.”

“Checking now,” Elijah said. His hands moved with the focused speed of someone who had been waiting for something to do.” Service gate. Side path. Five forty-one.”

Five forty-one.

Seventy minutes ago. She had been gone for seventy minutes and I had been lying on my bed looking at the ceiling not sleeping and she had already been gone.

“Direction,” I said.

“On foot,” Elijah said. “South along the perimeter road. After that she’s outside our coverage.”

South.

South from this house, on foot, took you toward the city center. Toward the hospital. Toward James, who had gone back to his office yesterday with a blood sample in his pocket and had called me with results that had changed everything.

The understanding arrived before I finished the thought.

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“Jatues,” I satu.

Klaus was already moving. ” call him.”

“Call him now,” I said. “Right now.”

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Klaus called twice in the space of ninety seconds.

No answer.

The third call went to voicemail immediately, which meant the phone was either off or unavailable. James Wright did not turn his phone off. He had told me this once, offhandedly, the specific policy of a physician who had learned that unavailability had consequences. He did not turn his phone off.

“We need to go,” I said.

“Rivera-”

“We need to go now.”

I was already moving toward the stairs. Louis’s room was the second door, and I pushed it open and he was awake, which did not surprise me because Louis had a specific awareness of the house when things were happening in it that I had never fully explained and had stopped trying to.

He was sitting up in bed looking at the door.

“Get dressed,” I said. “We’re going out.”

“Is something wrong with Bianca?” he said.

I looked at him. “Get dressed, Louis. Quickly.”

He got out of bed without another question, which was its own kind of answer about what he understood and how much.

We took two cars because Klaus insisted on it and he was right to. Elijah stayed at the house to manage the monitoring and coordinate with Roy, who was already making calls to the network of people we had spent weeks building without sufficient result. Mikael came with us in the second car.

Louis sat beside me in the back.

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He had dressed in under three minutes and come downstairs with his shoes already on and his red water bottle in his hand, the one he carried everywhere, and he had gotten into the car without being asked twice. He was pale. The particular pale of the past three weeks, which I now understood completely and which sat in my chest with a weight that had nothing to do with the morning air.

“Dad,” he said, as we turned onto the main road.

“Yes.”

“Is James okay?”

I looked at him. He was looking forward, through the gap between the front seats, watching the road.

“I don’t know yet,” I said.

He nodded. He held the water bottle in both hands and said nothing else for the rest of the drive.

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Theard it before I saw it.

The specific quality of a crowd that has gathered around something wrong. It was a sound I recognized from years of dealing with situations where wrong things had happened in public places, a particular combination of voices that was too many and too urgent and too uneven to be anything ordinary. It carried down the block before we reached the hospital.

Klaus pulled the car to a stop at the edge of the gathering and I was out before it fully stopped.

The crowd was in front of the hospital’s main entrance and spilling onto the pavement beside it, which meant whatever had happened had drawn people from inside as well as out. Staff in scrubs at the edges. Visitors who had stopped. People with phones raised. The particular terrible efficiency of a crowd that has organized itself around a spectacle without being asked

I heard pieces of it as I moved.

Someone fell.

From the roof.

Two of them.

James is that James Wright?

The woman, did you see-

I pushed through.

Louis was behind me, close, his hand finding the back of my jacket without me reaching for him. I felt him there and I moved and he moved with me and Klaus was on my other side clearing space.

We got through the inner edge of the crowd.

The hospital entrance had been cleared by staff, a rough perimeter of people in scrubs keeping the immediate area around the two figures on the pavement accessible for the medical team already working. Portable equipment had been brought out. Someone was doing compressions. Someone else was managing an airway.

I saw James first.

He was on his back on the pavement, unconscious, the specific stillness of someone whose body had stopped making decisions for itself. His face was wrong in the way faces were wrong after significant impact, the swelling already visible, the particular color of skin that had been through trauma. A physician was working on him with the focused intensity of someone who was not thinking about anything except the next action.

And then I saw her.

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The person beside him was wearing Bianca’s face. Bianca’s coat, the one from last night. Bianca’s hair spread across the pavement in the specific way of someone who had fallen from a height. The injuries were worse than James’s, visible even from here. The medical team working on her was the larger of the two groups.

Louis saw her at the same moment.

He let go of my jacket.

I turned and caught him but not fast enough – he had already taken three steps forward, toward her, his mouth open with something that was not quite a word yet, the specific sound of a child who has seen something and is still processing whether it’s real.

“Louis-”

“Mummy-”

Two of the medical staff who had been holding the perimeter moved, not roughly but firmly, interposing themselves. One of

Chapter 328

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theru caught Louis around the middle, a containment rather than a restraint, and Louis didn’t fight it but he didn’t stop reaching, either, his arms forward, his whole body oriented toward the figure on the pavement.

“That’s not-“I started, and then stopped.

I could not finish that sentence here. Not in this crowd, not with these people, not with Louis in someone’s arms reaching toward the face of his mother on a hospital pavement.

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Chapter 277