Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 229

Chapter 229

RIVERA

I looked at him.

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Twelve years of trauma medicine and enough understanding of physics to turn a situation that should have killed him into one that had left him in room four-fourteen with a clear head and things to tell me. I did not say any of what I was thinking about this because James was not asking for it and the room had limited time and there was something else.

“The necklace,” I said.

He looked at me.

“When she hit the ledge,” I said. “The necklace she was wearing. The dark stone on the silver chain.”

His eyes changed. The specific change of someone accessing something they had filed carefully.

“I saw it break,” he said.

I went still.

“On the way down,” he said. “When I grabbed her. The chain caught on something – my hand, the railing, I don’t know exactly – and I felt it go and I saw the stone come loose.” He looked at me with the careful attention of someone who understood that this information was more important than it appeared. “It went down. Below the ledge. To the service road.” He paused. “I don’t know where it is now. It was small and dark and it went into a surface that was also dark and I was managing other things.”

I stood up.

The movement was not planned. My body made the decision before my mind fully processed what James had told me and what it meant, and I was on my feet and the chair was behind me and was looking at the door before I caught myself.

“Rivera,” James said.

I turned back.

“Is it important?” he said. “The necklace.”

“Yes,” I said. “The necklace is—” I stopped. I looked at him in the bed with his clear eyes and his damaged shoulder and his cracked ribs and the dressing on his head. He had told me everything he had. He had told me accurately and in order and without embellishment. He deserved the honest answer. “It’s the anchor. For the working. The magic that made her look like Bianca — it needed something physical to hold it together. Something worn close to the body.” I paused. “If the anchor breaks—”

“The working collapses,” James said.

“Yes.”

He processed this. I watched him do it, the specific efficiency of an intelligent man moving information into its correct place.” Which means Voss knows,” he said. “If the anchor breaks, she knows the doppelganger is compromised.”

“Yes.”

“Which means she knows you know.”

“Yes.”

He looked at me for a moment. Then he said, “Go.”

“James

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“I have nurses and adequate medication and I am not going anywhere for the next several days,” he said. “Go do what you need to do.” He held my eyes. “Find her, Rivera.”

The her was not the woman from the roof terrace.

I knew that. He knew I knew that.

“Rest,” I said. It was insufficient and we both knew that too. I left anyway because James had told me to and because he was right and because every minute I spent in room four-fourteen was a minute that Voss was spending understanding that her operation had just changed.

Klaus was in the corridor outside the emergency bay where I had left him.

Louis was beside him, sitting on the chairs that lined the corridor wall, his red water bottle in his lap and his eyes on the middle distance in the specific way of someone who was thinking rather than watching.

I went to Klaus and I said it quietly, close, so that the corridor traffic didn’t carry it.

“The necklace broke,” I said. “When they hit the ledge. James saw it go.”

Klau’s looked at me.

“It’s gone,” I said. “The anchor is broken.”

The sequence of implications moved through his face in the order they arrived. I watched him reach the same place! had reached in room four-fourteen when James said the words.

“She knows,” Klaus said.

“The moment it broke,” I said. “If not before. She has people watching, she’s been running this operation for fifteen years, she would have had a contingency for the doppelganger being compromised.” I paused. “She’s moving right now. Whatever she was going to do with forty-eight hours, she’s compressing it.”

“The locations,” Klaus said.

“Callahan’s people found three locations,” I said. “We have been treating this as intelligence to be verified. We need to treat it as active sites and we need to move on them now.” I looked at him. “All three simultaneously. If she’s at one and we hit the wrong one first, she hears about the others before we reach them.”

Klaus was already on his phone.

“And Thorne,” I said.

He looked at me over the phone.

“Now,” I said. “We pull the thread now. Whatever it costs us, we pull it.”

He nodded and put the phone to his ear.

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I went to Louis and crouched to his level and he looked at me with the eyes that had been older than his face for as long as I could

remember.

“Are we finding her?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “We’re finding her now.”

He looked at me for a moment with the gravity that was his most consistent quality, the assessment of someone who was deciding whether the answer was true.

He decided it was.

“kay,” he said.

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