Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 313

Chapter 313

ARIA

The celebration had been consuming Shadowmere for three days before it actually arrived.

I'd watched it build from the periphery, the way I watched most things in this pack — present but adjacent, close enough to observe but never quite integrated into the center of it. The cooks had been working in rotating shifts since the morning after the Ghost Council announced the formal celebration date, and the smells coming from the kitchens had been extraordinary in ways that made my chest tight with something complicated, because the effort was genuine and collective and beautiful and none of it had anything to do with me.

It had everything to do with Ivory.

That was the honest assessment, and I was getting better at honest assessments even when they were uncomfortable. The pack was celebrating their healer's recovery as much as they were celebrating the Hunt's conclusion. They were celebrating that Kael had survived the ambush. They were celebrating Shadowmere's strength and continuity and all the things that the Ghost Hunt was apparently meant to affirm about a pack's essential character.

I was an incidental part of that. A champion by technical definition, four fragments notwithstanding.

I helped where I could. Showed up to oversight meetings. Approved floral arrangements with the studied focus of someone trying to demonstrate that they took their Luna responsibilities seriously regardless of whether anyone thought they deserved those responsibilities. Stayed out of the kitchens when it was clear that the head cook preferred to manage her own domain without interference, and offered actual useful input when asked about guest accommodations, which turned out to be an area where I could contribute without stepping on anyone's deeply felt loyalties.

The guest list was significant. Twelve visiting Alpha pairs, their attendants, representatives from four allied packs, and the full Ghost Council who were apparently staying through the celebration as tradition demanded. Shadowmere hadn't hosted this many outside wolves since before Kael's curse years, and the logistics of feeding, housing, and entertaining them while also maintaining the pack's internal dynamics required a coordination that the senior pack members handled with impressive efficiency.

I stayed out of the way and tried to be useful in the spaces where staying out of the way and being useful weren't mutually exclusive.

Ivory came out of the healing bay on the second day of preparation.

I knew because I heard it — the change in the ambient sound of the pack grounds, a particular quality of warmth spreading through the routine noise of preparation like something settling into place. People gravitating toward her naturally, conversations brightening, the small adjustments that happened when a community's center of gravity reappeared after a period of absence.

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