Lahat ng Kabanata ng Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore: Kabanata 221 - Kabanata 230

Chapter 222RIVERA Louis's room had the specific quiet of a child who had been told it was bedtime and had complied without argument, which with Louis usually meant he was either very tired or thinking about something he hadn't decided to say yet.Both, tonight, probably.He was sitting on the edge of his bed in his pajamas when I knocked and pushed the door open. His school things were already put away, which he did without being asked, a habit so consistent that I had stopped noticing it. The lamp on his nightstand was on. The dinosaurs were in their arrangement on the shelf. Everything in the room was where it was supposed to be.He had a glass in his hand.I registered it without showing that I had registered it. A pale liquid, slightly cloudy, in the cup he usually used for water. Not water."Hey," I said."Hey," he said.I came in and sat on the edge of the bed beside him, the way I had sat on the edge of his bed for five years when the situation called for it. He leaned slight

Chapter 224FAKE BIANCAThe guest room ceiling was different from the bedroom ceiling.I had not been in this room before tonight. I had not needed to be. My access to the house had been complete, the rooms I required available, the routines I maintained uninterrupted for weeks. The guest room had been a space I passed without entering, a door at the end of the hallway that existed in my peripheral awareness as a location and nothing more.Now I was in it.I lay on the bed and looked at the ceiling and calculated.The calculation was the first thing. Before the anger, before the communication to Voss, before any action — the calculation. This was how I had been built. Not to feel first and act second. To assess and then move. The feeling, such as it was, existed alongside the calculation the way weather existed alongside a building. Present, relevant to conditions, but not structural.The calculation was this.Rivera had gone to Louis's room. He had talked to the boy. He had taken the

Chapter 226RIVERAI found the guest room empty at five fifty-three in the morning.I knew the time precisely because I had looked at my phone when I came upstairs, a habit from a night that had not involved much sleep. I had been in the study with Klaus and Roy and Elijah until past two, working through what we had and what it meant and what the next step required, and then I had come upstairs and lain on my side of the bed in the dark and looked at the ceiling and thought about Bianca in a room somewhere and the forty-eight hours that were becoming forty and then thirty-eight and then less.At five fifty I got up.I went to the guest room because Klaus had said don't let her leave the house with the necklace and I needed to know she was still there before the house started moving and the morning made everything harder to control.The door was open.Not ajar. Open. The way a door looked when someone had left through it without caring about the sound of it closing behind them because

Chapter 228 RIVERA James was in room four-fourteen. I knew this because the charge nurse had told Klaus and Klaus had told me, and because I had been sitting in the corridor outside the emergency bay for two hours watching doors and waiting for someone to tell me something useful, and when the something useful finally came it was that James Wright was awake and asking for me specifically. Not for the medical team lead. Not for the administrator who had been circling the situation since seven in the morning with the specific anxiety of someone whose institution had just had two people fall off its roof. For me. I told Klaus to stay with Louis and went alone. --- The fourth floor was quieter than the floors below. The particular quiet of a ward that had organized itself into its daily rhythm, the controlled movement of people who knew where they were going and why. Room four-fourteen was at the end of the corridor, the kind of placement that meant they had put him somewhere with l

Chapter 230KLAUSThe broken anchor changed everything.I walked away from Rivera and Louis in that hospital corridor and I found a quiet corner near the stairwell exit and I stood in it and I thought. Not long. I did not have long. But enough to work through the sequence properly before I started making calls, because calls made before the thinking was done produced action that ran in the wrong direction, and wrong-direction action at this stage cost more than the time it took to think.The anchor was broken.A doppelganger working of the complexity Voss had built did not survive a broken anchor. The anchor was not a component. It was the foundation. Every other part of the construction sat on top of it, the appearance, the voice, the memory architecture, the behavioral patterns — all of it required the anchor to hold it together. Without the anchor the working did not degrade gradually. It collapsed. Immediately and completely.Which meant the doppelganger was gone.Which meant Voss