Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 309

Chapter 309

JASON

I'd been standing outside Ivory's curtained recovery area for approximately three minutes before I actually knocked, which was not behavior I was particularly proud of. I was a man who had spent years in intelligence work — had knocked on doors that concealed genuinely dangerous people, had walked into rooms where the wrong word could have ended my career or my life, had conducted interviews with individuals whose entire purpose was to make me uncomfortable enough to leave.

Standing outside a hospital curtain trying to find the right words to say to a woman who'd just gotten three years of complicated history returned to her all at once should not have been the harder task.

And yet.

"Come in," Ivory's voice carried through the curtain, and it sounded like her — that particular quality of composure she maintained even when she was clearly exhausted, the kind of voice that didn't announce its owner's condition but didn't hide it either.

I pulled the curtain aside and stepped in.

She was sitting up against the pillows, which was a better sign than the last reports I'd received, which had involved her being horizontal and too drained to do much besides breathe. There was color in her face now, faint but present. Her eyes showed the bruising from the blood vessel hemorrhaging that had apparently accompanied memory restoration — the rust-colored tracks had been mostly cleaned away but the swelling remained, the shadows beneath her eyes the deep purple of someone who'd been through something significant and was in the early stages of coming back from it.

She looked like herself, is what I'm saying. Exhausted and damaged and clearly still processing things that were going to take time, but fundamentally herself in ways that the pale, still version from two days ago had not been.

"Jason," she said. Her tone was warm. And something else — something more careful than usual. Like she was deciding something about how to hold this conversation before it had properly started.

"I brought food," I said, lifting the covered tray I'd carried from the kitchens. "And before you tell me half the pack has already brought you food, I know. Nina told me. But I figured you might be tired of whatever the healers have been giving you, which based on my experience with this healing bay is some combination of broth and things that are nutritionally complete and forgettable."

The careful expression shifted slightly into something that was closer to genuine. "You're not wrong," she said. "Come in. Sit down."

I set the tray on the small table beside her bed — actual food, the kind of meal that communicated care through specificity rather than just volume. I'd paid attention over the months we'd been spending time together. I knew what she liked. Had filed those observations away without quite examining why I was doing it, and now sitting down on the visitor's chair beside her bed, I was acutely conscious of having done that filing and what it might mean in the current context.

She lifted the cover and looked at the food for a moment. Something moved across her face — recognition, I thought. The awareness of being known in the specific way.

"Thank you," she said. It was quiet and meant it.

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