Semua Bab Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore: Bab 171 - Bab 180

Chapter 172RIVERAI thought about her, earlier tonight. Sitting in the car outside the pack house, watching Matthew go in.Thought about what she'd said this morning. About Mia's car in the driveway, about sitting in the dark and making the call she could live with, about coming back.She'd come back.She was here, quiet at the end of the table, and the night had been long and nothing had gone as planned and she was tired in a way that had been building for days.I wanted to give her a better ending to the night than this debrief. Wanted to give her the clean resolution that she'd been working toward and hadn't gotten.I didn't have it. None of us did.The debrief wound down. There was nothing more to be said tonight that was going to produce useful conclusions—we were past the point of information and into the point of needing sleep to think clearly, and Klaus was the first one to name that."Get some rest," he said. "We work again in the morning."People moved. Elijah went to the r

Chapter 174BIANCAI worked.The join in the barrier had begun to respond to my attention. Not yielding—not yet—but changing in the way materials changed when you applied consistent pressure over time. A slight softening. A loosening of the tension in that particular section, the two practitioners' work beginning to separate at the seam in the way that joined things separated when one side was warm and the other was cool and the expansion rates were different.I was being the warmth.Slow, patient, continuous.In the gaps between pressing at the barrier, when I needed to rest the specific kind of focused attention that counter-resonance work required, I thought.I thought about the doppelganger.Voss had said it was built from my hair and memories. Hair was easy to access—I shed hair constantly, as everyone did. In the safe house, in the hospital, anywhere I'd been for the past weeks. Anyone who'd had access to spaces I'd occupied could have collected what they needed.That was a long

Chapter 176 MATTHEW "So the dinosaurs should be safe." He buckled himself in with the efficient speed of someone who wanted to be buckled in so they could continue talking. "I've put the most important ones in the keep-at-home category, like we discussed. The middle-importance ones I'm bringing. And I'm bringing the Brachiosaurus specifically because it's the largest and if Biscuit has to carry something in his mouth I'd rather it be the one I'm least attached to." "That's strategic thinking," I said, pulling out of the drop-off zone. "I thought so too." He looked at me in the rearview mirror with the studied casualness of someone who was trying not to look like they were about to ask the question they were about to ask. "Have you thought about it any more?" I had thought about it. Had spent part of the morning thinking about it, running through the relevant factors in the way I ran through most things now—not just the fear version, not just the worst-case scenario version, but t

Chapter 178 MATTHEW The sound woke me at four-fifteen in the morning. I knew the time because I'd been sleeping lightly enough that the digital clock on my bedside table was the first thing I looked at when my eyes opened, a reflex I'd developed in the months of Theo's worst nights when timing mattered. The sound had been quiet—not a crash, not a shout, nothing that would immediately read as emergency to someone in deep sleep. But I wasn't in deep sleep, hadn't been since the assembly, and what I'd heard was wrong in the specific way that wrong sounds were wrong at four in the morning. A door. Not closing. Opening very carefully, which was its own kind of sound. I was out of bed before I'd fully decided to be, moving toward the bedroom door in the dark with the particular alertness that bypassed the normal stages of waking and went straight to functional. I'd slept in my clothes, which I'd been doing since we'd returned from BloodMoon City—not out of conscious decision exactly, bu

Chapter 180 MATTHEW "Yes," Marcus said, from behind me. "They're going to tell Voss that a direct extraction attempt failed. That they took significant losses. That the target has protection they didn't fully account for." "So she recalibrates again." "She has to," Marcus said. "But Matthew—she's running out of time. If Roy's information was right about the ritual window, she has seven days left. Maybe fewer. And she's now lost people. Lost the assembly approach. Lost a direct attempt." A pause as he worked. "She's going to become more desperate, not less. Desperate people make mistakes. But they also take risks they wouldn't otherwise take." I thought about that. "We need the Alpha King's office updated immediately," I said. "Everything that happened tonight, the tactical profile of the group, whatever Callahan can tell us about their approach patterns and equipment." I turned from the window. "Can you do that from here?" "I can do it from anywhere," Marcus said. "I'll make con