Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 234

Chapter 234

Chapter 234

MATTHEW

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Marcus knocked at eight forty.

I knew it was him before I said come in, because Marcus had a specific knock that had not changed in fifteen years. Three times, evenly spaced, with the precise amount of force that communicated I have something to tell you without communicating it was urgent enough to warrant urgency.

“Come in,” I said.

He came in and closed the door behind him, which told me before he said anything that the content was not for the general hearing of whoever happened to be passing in the corridor.

“Sir,” he said. “I’ve had a call from the city detective division this morning. Regarding Mia Roberts.”

I looked at him.

“She was found in her apartment this morning,” he said. “By a neighbor. The neighbor noticed the door had been open since sometime yesterday evening and knocked, and when there was no response she contacted building management.” He paused, one beat, the specific pause he used when the next part required a moment of its own. “The initial assessment is suicide. She had hanged herself. There was a note on the table in her handwriting.”

The room was quiet.

Marcus stood in the middle of it and did not add anything to what he had said, because adding things was not his role and he understood this with the complete understanding of someone who had spent fifteen years getting it right. He had delivered the information accurately and in the correct order and he was now waiting.

I looked at the window.

The morning outside was the ordinary morning it had been five minutes ago, before Marcus knocked.

I did not know what to do with what Marcus had just told me.

That was the honest answer, and I sat with it without trying to make it into something more organized. Mia Roberts was dead. She had been found in her apartment by a neighbor who noticed an open door. There was a note in her handwriting and no sign of anyone else in the apartment.

I had known Mia for eight years.

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Eight years was a long time. Long enough to build something and long enough to watch it deteriorate and long enough to understand, looking back, that the thing built had never been what I told myself it was while I was inside it. It had been convenient and mutual and sometimes warm, and it had been wrong in ways I had spent four years refusing to examine because examining them would have required examining myself, and I had not been ready to do that.

I had not been kind to her in the last months.

This was true and I sat with it as a fact rather than a defense or an accusation. I had been unkind. I had distanced myself from her after Bianca’s death because the weight of what I had allowed and what I had participated in had finally arrived at full size, and Mia was part of that weight, and I had not known how to be around her without feeling the specific guilt of someone who understood too late what his choices had cost. So I had been cold. I had been absent. I had let her exist in a house that was mine, in a life that had been built around expectations I had allowed her to form, and then I had withdrawn without the honesty of a real conversation because the real conversation required things from me I had not wanted to give.

And then she had been approached by Voss’s people.

Coerced. That was the word Marcus had used when the intelligence first came in, and I had accepted it because the alternative

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ditfialty. Sophie and Daniel were both already there.”

I breathed.

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Theo was at school. Normal morning. He did not know about Mia, and the question of whether he would ever need to know, and in what form, and at what age, was a question I would think about later when I had more capacity to think about it correctly.

“That’s all,” I said.

“Sir,” Marcus said. He moved toward the door with the quiet efficiency of someone who understood when a room needed to be

empty.

He closed the door behind him with exactly the same amount of sound he had used when he knocked. Three beats in, three beats out. Precise to the requirement.

I sat in my office alone.

I did not reach for anything. Not the papers on my desk, not my phone, not the work that had been accumulating and that Marcus managed with the patient competence of someone who had learned to buffer his Alpha from administrative accumulation during difficult periods. I sat and I looked at the courtyard and I let the information find its own shape without trying to direct it.

Mia was dead.

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