Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 232

Chapter 232

Chapter 232

RIVERA

The room was on the second floor.

They had put her away from the main ward, which was the practical decision, of a medical team managing an unusual situation. A woman who had fallen from a roof and survived. A woman who had Bianca’s face and Bianca’s fingerprints and Bianca’s blood type, because whatever Voss had built had been built thoroughly enough to replicate the biological surface of the person it was copying. The staff treating her believed they were treating Bianca Morrison. I had not corrected this yet because correcting it required an explanation I did not have time to give and which would produce questions I did not have answers to.

I stood outside the room and looked at her through the window in the door.

She was unconscious. Had been since they brought her in. The injuries from the ledge impact were significant – the medical team lead had used words like spinal assessment and internal monitoring and we’ll know more in the next few hours, which was the specific language of people who were being careful about what they promised. She was breathing on her own. Her vitals were stable in the way that meant not immediately dying rather than fine.

She looked like Bianca.

That was the thing I kept arriving at, standing at the window. Not as a surprise — I had known this for weeks in the abstract and had known it confirmed since last night. But knowing it and standing outside a hospital room looking at it were different experiences. She looked like Bianca with the specific completeness of something that had been built with extraordinary care. The face was right. The hands resting on the blanket were right. The particular way her hair fell across the pillow was right.

I had slept beside this face for weeks.

I had talked to it. I had made coffee for it in the mornings. I had watched it look at Louis with what I had told myself was a slightly different quality than usual and had told myself I was overthinking. I had caught its wrist when it reached for Louis and something in me had said wait, and I had not listened to that something clearly enough or fast enough.

I stood at the window and felt something I could not name cleanly.

Not pity. Not anger, though anger was present somewhere underneath. Something more complicated than either of those. The specific feeling of looking at a thing that had been used against you and trying to locate the correct emotional response to it and finding that the correct response did not exist in a simple form.

She was not Bianca.

She was a constructed thing, built from Bianca’s hair and Bianca’s memories and deployed into my life as a weapon with deliberate precision. She had put something in Louis’s drink every morning. She had redirected the investigation. She had stood in my bedroom and gripped the anchor at her throat when I reached for it, the panic of something protecting its foundation, and she had constructed an argument from Bianca’s history and used it as a shield.

She had also gone off a roof.

Not by choice. By the failure of a plan that had been working until James Wright heard the greeting and knew. She had hit a maintenance ledge at significant speed and she was in a hospital bed with spinal monitoring and internal assessments ongoing, and the anchor that had held her together was broken and scattered on a service road somewhere below.

I pushed the door open and went in.

The room had the specific quality of all hospital rooms, which was a kind of enforced neutrality. Clean surfaces, managed light, the ambient sound of monitoring equipment doing its steady work. I pulled the chair to the side of the bed and sat in it and looked at her face.

Chapter 23

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Up cluse it was the same.

I had been close to Bianca’s face more times than I could count. I knew the specific architecture of it in a way that months of living with someone built without you deciding to. The distance between her eyes. The specific line of her jaw. The way her mouth sat when she was asleep, which was slightly different from how it sat when she was awake but thinking.

This face had all of that.

I sat beside it and I spoke quietly, the way you spoke in a hospital room when the person in the bed might be able to hear and might not and you were choosing to assume the former.

“The operation is over,” I said.

The monitors kept their rhythm. The light through the window was the flat mid-morning kind.

“Voss knows,” I said. “The anchor broke when you hit the ledge. She felt it. She’s been moving since before this morning, probably, pulling everything out of Silver Moon, relocating whatever she has left.” I looked at the face that was Bianca’s face.” You were already finished before you went to the hospital. You just didn’t know it yet.”

The breathing continued, slow and even.

“The necklace is gone,” I said. “James saw it break. It went down to the service road and we haven’t found it yet, but it doesn’t matter anymore. The anchor is broken and the working is down and whatever you are without it, this is what you are now.”

I did not know what she was without it. This was something I had not had time to think through fully. Whether the constructed thing persisted when the anchor collapsed or whether it began to revert. Whether the face in front of me would still be Bianca’s face when she woke up or whether it would become something else. I had not asked Roy about this yet because there had been too many other things to ask about first.

“When you wake up,” I said, “I need you to tell me where she is.”

I kept my voice even. Not threatening. Not pleading. The register of someone stating a fact about what came next.

“I don’t know what you know about where the operation is based,” I said. “I don’t know how much Voss gave you in terms of location, structure, the actual site. You may have been kept ignorant of it deliberately. She is careful about that kind of compartmentalization.” I paused. “But if you know anything anything at all – I need you to tell me when you wake up.”

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