Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 282

Chapter 282

Chapter 282

KAEL

Was that too much? Was I constructing a villain out of a woman whose only real crime was a secret visit born from emotional weakness, from the very inadequacy she’d been trying desperately to outrun?

I didn’t know. And not knowing was worse than knowing would have been, because not knowing meant I had to hold both possibilities simultaneously-the Aria who’d made a stupid, understandable mistake and hidden it out of fear, and the Aria who’d done something worse- and treat her with the fairness that both possibilities required without the information that would let me distinguish between them.

The curtain at the entrance moved. I looked up expecting a healer.

It was Aria.

She stood there in clean clothes, hair still damp, eyes showing everything she was feeling because she’d never quite mastered the art of hiding what was in her face. What I saw there was something past shame, past even the acute humiliation of her public confession. She looked hollowed out. Like the trial had reached inside her and taken something essential, and she hadn’t decided yet whether what remained was enough to rebuild from.

Some part of me wanted to close the distance. To tell her that I understood more than I’d said out there, that I knew fear and weakness and the desperation of wanting someone to hand you a reason your pain made sense. The part of me that had watched her struggle and chosen to choose her anyway, that had found something real in the thing we were building despite all its complications.

But Ivory stirred on the bed before I could decide what to do with any

of it.

Her eyes opened. She was confused at first-the particular confusion of someone waking into a reality they’re not sure they recognize-and then her

moved around the space gaze

and landed on Aria standing in the entrance, and I watched the confusion become something else entirely.

“Get out,” Ivory said. Her voice was destroyed from whatever the memory reintegration had done to her, but the words landed with absolute clarity. “Get the fuck out of my sight before I finish what I started during the trial.”

Aria didn’t move immediately. Just stood there absorbing the words, and I could see that she’d

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expected them, that she’d walked in here knowing this was what waited for her and had come anyway.

I should have said something. Should have played mediator, should have managed the situation with the Alpha authority I’d invoked out there when I’d kept Aria’s position intact. Should have used the influence I had over both of them to keep this from getting worse.

Instead, I said nothing. Watched Aria take one breath, then another. Watched her hold Ivory’s hatred without flinching from it.

“I know,” Aria said finally. Her voice was quiet enough that I almost missed it. “I know. I’ll go.”

She pulled the curtain back and left without another word.

I sat there with Ivory’s hand still in mine and felt the specific exhaustion of someone who’d been making decisions under pressure for too long, who’d been prioritizing correctly and faithfully and had still ended up in a place where everyone was wounded and nothing was clean.

“You should be with her,” Ivory said. She was looking at the curtain Aria had just gone through, her expression beyond anger into something grimmer and more tired. “She’s your mate, Kael. Whatever she did, she’s your mate.”

“I know what she is,” I said.

“Then go.”

“I’m not leaving until I know you’re-”

“I’m fine,”. Ivory said, sharp enough that it wasn’t an invitation to argue. “I will be fine. I’ve had worse than this.” A pause, and then, quieter: “I remember worse than this.”

The reminder landed between us like a stone dropped into water. I watched the ripples of it move across her face-not the fresh pain of new knowledge, but the reorganization of a person who’d just gotten back a self they’d been missing without knowing it. She was figuring out who she was now that she had all of herself to work with again.

“Three years,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

“Three years,” she agreed. “Give me a day or two before I’m ready to discuss them. I’m still sorting through everything.” She turned her head to look at me directly for the first time since she’d woken. “You look terrible, for what it’s worth.”

“It’s been a long Hunt.”

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