Lahat ng Kabanata ng Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore: Kabanata 231 - Kabanata 240

Chapter 231KLAUSI stood in the stairwell corner for another moment after I ended the call with Elijah.Silver Moon was clear.Which meant the threat to Theo Morrison and Matthew Morrison had relocated. Which meant the immediate danger to that territory had reduced significantly. Voss had too many problems of her own right now to commit resources to an acquisition target in a location she was actively withdrawing from.Which meant I needed to talk to Callahan.I had not spoken to him directly since the situation in Silver Moon began. I had communicated through Matthew, through the information channels that ran between our operation and the Morrison pack's security arrangement. This had been the correct approach while the operations were separate and the information needed to stay compartmentalized.It was no longer the correct approach.Callahan had contacts, he had told Matthew. He had said this simply and without elaboration, the way people referred to things they did not need to e

Chapter 233RIVERAThe 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

Chapter 235MATTHEWEight years of history ending in an apartment where the door had been left open since the previous evening and a neighbor had knocked and found her. A note on the table. Her handwriting.I thought about Voss's people.I could not stop thinking about Voss's people. The note was in her handwriting and the apartment showed no sign of intrusion and the detectives were treating it as it appeared. All of that was true and all of it was exactly what a professional operation would produce if they wanted something to look like one thing while being another.I did not know.That was what I kept arriving at. I did not know. She had been isolated and frightened and the pack had been cruel to her in the specific collective cruelty of a group that needed someone to blame and had found her convenient, and I had not protected her from that because I had been too occupied with my own guilt and my own transformation to think about what was happening t

Chapter 237THEOCal made the small sound he made when something was acceptable. We went to the car, which was parked in the correct spot in the pickup area, and I got in the back because I always got in the back now, not the front, which had been a brief moment of negotiation two weeks ago when I had tried the front seat and Cal had said I wasn't heavy enough for the airbag to be safe and I had looked this up later and it was true so I had stopped arguing about it.He started the car.---We drove for a while.I was looking out the window at the streets going past. The city in the afternoon had a specific quality that was different from the morning, less sharp, more settled, like it had done most of what it was going to do and was now just continuing. I knew this route completely now. I knew which turn came after which turn and which building meant we were seven minutes away and which traffic light was always longer than it should be.I was watchi

Chapter 239THEOThe second dream came three nights later.I knew it was the same dream before it fully arrived, the way you knew a smell before you could name it, something in the quality of the dark that was different from ordinary sleeping dark. And then the room was there.Stone walls. The single bulb behind the metal cage, the light going nowhere. The crack in the ceiling starting thin at the left corner and widening as it moved toward the center and splitting into two before it reached the light. I saw the crack and I knew I had seen it before and I knew this was the same place.She was there.Same position. The metal table, slightly tilted. The things around her wrists. She was looking at the ceiling when the dream started and then she looked at me, and the look was the same look from before, the one that said I need you to pay attention, the one that meant something important was coming and she was going to make sure I had it before she stopped