Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 305

Chapter 305

KAEL

The punching bag split open on my fourteenth strike — or maybe my fortieth, I'd lost count somewhere around the third one — and the contents sprayed outward in a cascade of sand and compacted padding that dusted Jordan's shoes and settled across the training room floor like debris from a small, controlled explosion. I stood with my fist still extended, breathing hard, chest heaving with the kind of exertion that felt satisfying in my body and accomplished absolutely nothing in my head.

Jordan looked down at his shoes. Looked at the ruined bag. Looked back at me with the expression of a man weighing several options and deciding that silence was the safest of them.

Then he let out a long, low whistle. "Ten," he said. "That was the tenth one."

I didn't answer. Just dropped my fists and tried to remember how to breathe like a person instead of an animal.

"So," Jordan said, stepping back slightly. Cautiously. With the particular care of someone who'd grown up around large predatory animals and had developed very finely tuned survival instincts as a result. "Are you feeling better?"

I growled.

He took another step back, hands coming up in a gesture that was partly surrender and partly laughter he was trying to suppress. "Okay, Alpha. Sheesh." The laughter lost the battle with his composure, coming out as a low chuckle that filled the quiet training room with a sound that felt almost obscene given the weight of everything I was carrying. "We've been through ten punching bags. Are you going to talk about your feelings, or are you just going to keep punching things and imagining they're Damon?"

I walked to the bench along the wall and sat down heavily, unwrapping the tape from my knuckles with more violence than the task required. The tape came away red in places — not deep wounds, just the kind of abrasions that came from sustained impact without adequate protection. My fault. I'd been too impatient to wrap properly when I'd come in, too full of the morning's particular variety of anger to bother with the rituals that made training sustainable rather than just destructive.

"What do you want me to say?" I asked. My voice came out rougher than I'd intended, scraped clean of anything diplomatic by two days of sustained emotional load.

Jordan retrieved a clean towel from the rack near the door and dropped it onto the bench beside me before pulling a stool close enough to sit without crowding me. He was good at that — understanding the geometry of my moods, knowing when to come near and when to maintain distance. It was part of why I'd made him my third, years ago, before the curse, before everything. He understood the architecture of my anger in ways that didn't require explanation.

"For one," he said, counting on his fingers with the casual ease of someone who'd been having difficult conversations with me for long enough to know that sometimes you just had to say the thing directly, "you're avoiding your mate."

I wrapped the towel around my hands and said nothing.

I set down the water and stared at him.

"You can't tell Aria to shut down her feelings for Damon," he said, his voice carrying no cruelty, just the flat accuracy of someone stating a thing he'd clearly been sitting with for a while, "when your wolf is still completely convinced that Ivory belongs to you."

The words hit with the precision of someone who'd been aiming carefully. Not because they were unkind but because they were exactly accurate, and accurate things had a different quality of impact than exaggerated ones. You could dismiss exaggeration by finding its edges and pointing out where it exceeded the truth. Accuracy didn't give you that escape.

I sat back down on the bench. Said nothing for a long moment. Through the training room's high windows, I could see the sky was shifting toward mid-morning, the light going gold and flat in the way it did in late winter. Outside, somewhere in the pack grounds, people were living their days. Training. Eating. Visiting Ivory with roasted chickens and get-well cards, because that was the kind of pack Shadowmere was — the kind that showed up for their healer with practical expressions of love, who understood that care could be delivered in protein and handwriting as much as in grand gestures.

My wolf had been pacing since before dawn. He did this — had been doing it for months, that restless circuit through the back of my consciousness that I'd been attributing to the bond adjustment period, to stress, to anything that wasn't the truth. But Jordan had just named the truth aloud, and there was no putting that particular thing back in its box.

"She remembers," I said. "Ivory. She has all of it back. Three years." I exhaled slowly. "Before, when she couldn't remember — it was easier to hold the line between what I felt and what I did about it. She didn't have context. Couldn't have known what she was to me, what we'd been. I could tell myself I was keeping appropriate distance because she was genuinely a person I was just getting to know again."