Lahat ng Kabanata ng Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore: Kabanata 261 - Kabanata 270

Chapter 262RIVERAWe hit the perimeter at 9:40.I'd told myself I wasn't going to be the one going in first. Klaus had said it plainly enough times in the planning that I'd stopped arguing the point out loud, even though I hadn't actually agreed to it. You're the Alpha King, he'd said. You don't lead with your own body into an unknown structure when we have people whose entire job is leading with their bodies into unknown structures. I'd nodded at the time. I had no intention of standing at the perimeter while my team went in to find her.The building sat low against a hillside an hour outside Silver Moon territory, the kind of place that looked, from any reasonable distance, like an old agricultural structure nobody had bothered tearing down. Stone walls, half sunk into the hill itself, a single visible door at ground level and nothing else suggesting there was more to it than storage space for equipment nobody used anymore.Roy had found it. Three days of pulling financial records,

Chapter 264CALI kept moving. Didn't break stride. It wasn't a question I'd expected in the middle of a corridor with an unknown threat behind us, but I understood, the longer I held it, why she was asking it now instead of later. Later might not give her the chance."I wasn't planning that far ahead," I said honestly. "My plan right now stops at getting him to a car. Everything past that, I haven't built yet.""I'm asking because I need to know what I'm walking into," she said. "Whether I should be ready to see him. Whether I should be somewhere else by the time he arrives."I glanced back at her, just briefly, enough to read her face in the bad light. She wasn't asking like someone hoping for a particular answer. She was asking like someone doing logistics, sorting variables, the same flat practical tone she'd used explaining the room's layout a minute earlier."You want to see him?" I asked. Not unkind. Just direct, the way I asked most things."No," she said. Flat. No hesitation

Chapter 266RIVERARoy's voice came through the comm before I'd fully processed what we'd just walked past."Sir. Lower cell block. We've got movement. Multiple signatures, possibly hostiles, possibly not.""On my way," I said, and meant it before I'd finished saying it.We moved fast through the stone corridors, past two more rooms I didn't let myself look into too closely, past doors standing open where Voss's people had clearly abandoned posts the moment they understood the building was no longer theirs to hold. The resistance, what there'd been of it, had thinned to almost nothing by the time we hit the lower level. A few guards surrendering outright, hands up, the specific posture of people who'd signed onto something they hadn't fully understood the size of until it started collapsing around them. Others running, and not being chased very hard, because finding the people we'd actually come for mattered more than chasing the ones who were leaving on their own.The radio traffic c

Chapter 268MATTHEWShe was standing a short distance off, near the edge of the floodlights, where the harsh white gave way to ordinary dark. Dark hair, blue scrubs that looked like they'd been through more than a single bad night. Still. Watching the activity around her with the careful stillness of someone who didn't quite trust that any of it was real yet.For one second, my chest did something I didn't have a name for. A jolt, fast and involuntary, the body recognizing something the mind hadn't caught up to yet.Then I looked again, and the thought that had tried to form itself collapsed under its own weight before it finished arriving. I'd just walked past a row of tables. I'd just seen, with my own eyes, what Voss had been building in that place — faces grown wrong, finished and unfinished, more than one of them wearing features I knew. I understood, standing there, exactly what kind of place this was and exactly what kind of thing could come out of it looking like someone you l

Chapter 270RIVERAI found her an hour later, in a quiet corner of the medical tent Klaus's people had set up at the edge of the site, sitting on the edge of a cot with a blanket someone had draped over her shoulders that she hadn't pulled tight around herself yet, like she hadn't decided yet whether she was actually cold or just supposed to look it.I stood in the doorway for a second before going in. I didn't know what I was supposed to look like, walking toward her. I had spent eight months building a life around a version of her that wasn't real, and now the real one was sitting twenty feet away, and I didn't trust my own face to do the right thing when I got close enough for her to read it.I went in anyway."Hey," I said. Stupid, inadequate, the kind of word you use when every other word feels too large to risk saying first."Hey," she said back.I sat down on the cot across from her, close enough to reach, not reaching yet. For a moment neither of us said anything. The tent was