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.

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