All Chapters of Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore: Chapter 181 - Chapter 190

Chapter 181 BIANCA I almost made it. That was the thought I kept returning to, even after everything that followed, even lying on the examination table with the restraints cutting into my wrists and my heartbeat still ragged from the electricity and the shame of it. I had almost made it. The seam in the barrier had opened enough, after three days of patient, careful, grinding work, that I had been able to push through it — not elegantly, not the way my mother would have done it, but through, which was all that had ever mattered. The ropes had taken another hour after that. The charm woven into the fibers was linked to the barrier, I'd realized on the second day — they reinforced each other, the barrier's integrity feeding the rope's resistance, so weakening one weakened both. By the time the seam was open enough to work through, the charm in the ropes had already begun to fray at the edges. I'd found the thread of it, the specific frequency that the practitioner had used, and I'd

Chapter 183 RIVERA We pulled into the driveway at half past two in the afternoon. I sat in the car for a moment after I cut the engine, looking at the front of the house with the specific feeling that came from being away long enough that familiar things looked slightly unfamiliar. The window boxes needed watering. Someone had left a package on the front step, which meant life had continued in our absence in the small domestic ways it always did regardless of what was happening elsewhere. Louis was asleep in the backseat. He'd gone under somewhere around the forty-minute mark and had stayed under for the remainder of the drive, the Ankylosaurus still in his hand, his head tipped to one side at the angle that should have been uncomfortable and never seemed to bother him. Bianca was in the passenger seat, looking at the house. She hadn't said much in the car. Had been quiet since we'd left the safe house — a different kind of quiet from her usual quiet, which was the quiet of

Chapter 185 RIVERA I hadn't planned to ask it. Had planned to say something smaller, something that opened a door without walking through it. But it came out as the actual question because the actual question was the one that had been sitting in my chest since the kitchen of the safe house and probably before that. She was quiet. The pause was long enough that I felt each second of it, the specific weight of a silence that is not the absence of a response but a response taking shape. "I don't know," she said. Her voice was very even. Not cold — not the evenness of someone choosing distance, but the evenness of someone being honest about the exact extent of what they could say. She reached across and switched off the bedside lamp. The room went dark. And she lay down, and turned on her side away from me, and after a moment I lay down too and looked at the ceiling in the dark and listened to her breathing slow toward something that might have been sleep or might have been the pe

Chapter 187 MATTHEW And then I came home and there was Callahan, who was getting worse rather than better and was managing this with a dry equanimity that I found both admirable and concerning, and there was Theo, who had been told the sleepover was postponed and had received this information with a quiet that I'd known immediately was not acceptance. The quiet had lasted approximately six hours. After that, Theo had begun being difficult in the specific and targeted way that Theo was difficult when he was upset about something and didn't know how to say so directly. He was not defiant in the obvious way — he didn't refuse instructions or have dramatic confrontations. He was difficult in the more precise way of a child who had decided that the people responsible for his disappointment should be made aware of it through a sustained campaign of minor friction. He took longer than necessary with everything. He responded to questions with technical compliance — answering exactly what w

Chapter 189 FAKE BIANCA The house was quieter than I'd expected. That was the first thing I had noticed when I arrived here, two days ago, stepping through the door with the real woman's memories sitting in my head like furniture in a room I hadn't decorated. Quieter and warmer and more lived-in than I'd been briefed to expect. There were dinosaurs on the windowsill in the front room, arranged in a specific formation that I had not touched because the child would notice if anything was moved even slightly. There were two mugs on the kitchen counter that lived there permanently, not put away, because that was where they were kept. There was a small dent in the second stair from the top where something heavy had been dropped at some point and nobody had fixed it. Details. Details were what kept you alive in this kind of work. I had been doing this for eleven years. Different faces, different names, different houses with different small dents in different stairs. The necklace had bee