Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 233

Chapter 233

Chapter 233

RIVERA

The room was quiet except for the monitors.

“She has been there for weeks,” I said.

I had not meant to say that. It came out the way things came out when you had been holding them at operational distance and the distance briefly collapsed.

“Since before you were in my house,” I said. “She was taken before she reached Matthew Morrison. We thought it was something else and it wasn’t. It was Voss. And she has been in a room somewhere for weeks while you were in my house drinking my coffee and I was sitting across from you at breakfast telling myself I was overthinking.”

The face did not respond.

“The window closes in under twenty-four hours,” I said. “If I don’t find her before it closes–”

I stopped.

I did not finish that sentence because the end of it was not something I was going to say out loud in a hospital room to an unconscious constructed thing while Louis was downstairs with a red water bottle and Klaus was on his phone pulling threads.

I sat for another moment.

Then I stood up, put the chair back where it had been, and looked at the face one more time.

“Tell me when you wake up,” I said. “Whatever you are and whatever she built you for. Tell me.”

I left the room.

Klaus was in the corridor outside, which I had expected. Klaus had a specific awareness of where I was and when I was about to emerge from somewhere that he had developed over years and which I had stopped finding uncanny.

He had his phone in his hand.

He looked at me with the specific expression he used when he had something to tell me that he had already organized into the correct order before I arrived.

“Thorne,” he said.

I looked at him.

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“He didn’t show up this morning,” Klaus said. “His scheduled morning at the Alpha King’s office. He has a nine o’clock that he has not missed in two years. He wasn’t there.” He paused. “Elijah sent someone to his apartment. Empty. Not hurriedly-the apartment is clean and organized in the way of someone who packed deliberately. Clothes gone, personal items gone, nothing left that tells us anything about where he went.”

I stood in the corridor and felt something settle through me that was not warm.

“When,” I said.

“Best estimate based on the neighbors and the building monitoring is sometime between midnight and three in the morning,” Klaus said. “He was home at eleven-fifteen. He was gone by three. He had a window, Rivera. He knew something was moving.”

“He has a direct line to her,” I said. “Voss. When the anchor broke, when she felt it and started moving, she told him.”

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Istoud in the corridor and looked at nothing in particular and felt the specific cold of a situation that had too few threads left and too little time to follow them properly.

Under twenty-four hours.

Bianca had been in a room for weeks.

I thought about her with the clarity that I had been keeping at operationia distance for days now, because operational distance was the only way to function when the alternative was the full weight of what had been happening while I sat at breakfast tables and had conversations and told myself I was overthinking a necklace.

She had been there the whole time.

Working on whatever she could find to work on, because that was what she did, because she was her mother’s daughter and she did not wait for rescue when she could find the seam in the thing containing her. I knew this about her with the specific certainty of someone who had watched her work. She had been there and she had been working and she was still working and the window was under twenty-four hours.

“Tell me the moment Roy narrows it,” I said.

“You’ll be the first,” Klaus said.

I looked at the door at the end of the corridor one more time.

Then I went back downstairs to Louis.

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