Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 307

Chapter 307

KAEL

The name had never been a title I'd sought. Had been given to me in the early years of my leadership, back when I was younger and rawer and had not yet developed the finely calibrated emotional control that ruling a pack for a long time eventually imposed on you. Back when my wolf's rage had been closer to the surface, when I'd been faster to shift and slower to come back from it, when other alphas had looked at me and seen something unpredictable enough to fear rather than just to respect.

I'd grown out of it. Or into it differently — controlled it better, expressed it more deliberately rather than letting it run. Had thought that was an improvement. Had believed, for years, that the alpha who thought before he acted was more effective than the one who simply acted.

But sitting in the wreckage of ten punching bags with diplomatic letters calling my leadership into question, I was aware that the reputation I'd let soften had been serving a function I'd underestimated.

The fear that Kael Deranged generated had been keeping certain threats from testing me. Had been doing deterrence work invisibly, in the background, preventing challenges from emerging that other alphas might otherwise have brought. And now that deterrence had apparently degraded — now that word had gotten out that my mate had visited our enemy and I'd responded by calling her inadequate at a public trial rather than by doing anything that looked like what the killer wolf would have done — the calculations were shifting.

They were reassessing whether Shadowmere was a pack worth messing with, or whether the alpha's softened edge had opened a door that someone should step through.

"The irony," I said, "is that Kael Deranged would have handled this worse. Would have handled Aria and Damon and the whole situation in ways that would have been cleaner in the short term and catastrophic in the long term. Would have made decisions out of wounded pride that I'd have been paying for in pack stability for years." I looked at Jordan. "And yet somehow the fact that I didn't do that has convinced people I'm manageable."

"You're not manageable," Jordan said, with a firmness that suggested it wasn't negotiable.

"Three alphas disagree."

"Three alphas are trying to read your response to a personal betrayal as evidence about your political capability," Jordan said. "That's a category error. What you do about Aria and what you'd do to someone who threatened Shadowmere's borders are completely different things and they know it. They're just looking for leverage and testing whether you're rattled enough to make bad decisions."

"Maybe," I said. I wasn't fully convinced.

Jordan leaned back on his stool. "Alpha Marcus. He's the one you're actually worried about."

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