Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 306

Chapter 306

KAEL

"And now?" Jordan prompted.

"Now she knows exactly what she meant to me and exactly what she lost." I turned the water bottle in my hands, giving my fingers something to work with. "And I can't pretend the distance is about her not knowing anymore. It's just about me choosing Aria. Choosing the bond. Choosing what I said I'd choose."

"Which is the right choice," Jordan said. "For the record. The bond is real. Breaking it would be—"

"I know what breaking it would be," I said. "I'm not considering it. That's not what this is." I rubbed the back of my neck with my free hand. "This is just — there's a grief involved in doing the right thing. Nobody talks about that. About how choosing correctly doesn't make the cost of choosing disappear. It just means you carry it while also telling yourself you have no right to complain because you made the right call."

Jordan was quiet in the particular way that meant he was listening hard.

I pushed forward because I'd gone this far and stopping now would only leave the unfinished thought to fester. "My wolf has never been fully at peace with the bond to Aria. Not the way bonds are supposed to settle, supposed to feel like coming home rather than like a reasonable decision you've made and committed to. He accepts it. He doesn't reject it. But deep down, in the part of me that doesn't think in words or rationale or pack stability calculations—" I stopped. "Deep down it's still Ivory. It has been for three years. It will probably be for a long time yet."

The admission cost something. I could feel the specific weight of it leaving me, the way certain truths were lighter after you said them and heavier while you were carrying them alone.

Jordan didn't look surprised. He looked like someone confirming a thing he'd already suspected. "And that's why you can't go to Aria with righteous fury about Damon when your wolf's doing the same thing about someone else."

"Yes," I said. "That's why."

The training room was quiet except for the distant sounds of the pack moving through its morning. Somewhere outside, someone was running sprints along the perimeter — I could hear the rhythm of it, the steady impact of feet against packed earth.

He'd meant it as a friendly warning. I understood that. Marcus was the kind of man who expressed concern by telling you exactly what people were saying about you, because he believed the information was more useful than the comfort of not knowing.

He wasn't wrong that they were talking. Wasn't wrong about what they were saying.

They were saying I wasn't the same alpha anymore. Saying that the man who'd killed visiting delegations for disrespecting Ivory — who'd shifted back from wolf form just long enough to put a diplomatic envoy on the ground and then walked away — had somehow been replaced by someone who let his mate visit their enemy in secret and then stood in front of the pack and told her she wasn't good enough instead of handling it quietly and decisively the way a real alpha would.

They were saying Kael Deranged was gone. That whatever I'd become, it was softer and more manageable and not particularly frightening.

"Three alphas," I said to Jordan, "who blatantly think my mate is a joke. That I was too lenient. That I'm not —" I stopped, the phrase catching in my throat with something like bitterness and something like grief. "That I'm not the killer wolf anymore. That I'm not Kael Deranged."