Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 323

Chapter 323

Chapter 323

ARIA

The speech had been something else entirely.

I’d watched Ivory dress Kael down in front of the entire assembled pack and their visiting guests with the serene confidence of someone who’d earned the right to do exactly that and knew it. *Child, you don’t speak when legends are talking.* And Kael, who was an Alpha who’d killed other Alphas for significantly less than that, had stood there and let her do it and the crowd had lost itself completely and the whole thing had been — I searched for the right word and couldn’t find one that covered all of it.

Were, whatever three:

–

–

It had been them. Whatever they of something built in impossible circumstances had made them into it was visible in that exchange, in the specific ease of two people who’d learned each other thoroughly enough to know exactly what they could do in each other’s presence. The roasting and the being roasted. The look she’d given him that meant *yes I know how funny this is* and the way he’d nearly lost himself at it. The sniffle over the medal that was theatrical and genuine at the same time, both things true simultaneously.

I’d stood in the crowd watching it and felt something that I was trying to be honest about rather than immediately translating into a more comfortable emotion. It wasn’t jealousy, exactly. Or not only jealousy. It was the specific feeling of watching something real and knowing you were on the outside of it.

And then Kael had stood at the front with the medal around his neck and listed us. His fellow champions. Jason and Elite and Nina and then my name, with the four fragments attached to it, stated plainly and publicly in front of everyone present.

Nina had given him a look that could have started a small fire, which I gathered was about his phrasing *not the champion, but* and I’d felt a small, startled warmth at the fact that

–

—

she’d been glared at rather than me for once.

—

―

He’d defended me. Even that

part the petty, affectionate, completely Shadowmere phrasing about there being only one champion and he had the medal had been its own form of inclusion. You couldn’t be included in the thing being teased if you weren’t part of the thing. Nina and Elite and Jason getting glared at meant they were inside something; and so was I.

I was still working out how I felt about that when Kael appeared beside me.

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—

He was getting food. That was what he said when he materialized at my elbow near the table I’d drifted back to the food area partly because it was something to do with my hands and partly because standing in one place too long invited either conversations I wasn’t ready for or the pointed non-conversations of people who’d decided that near me was somewhere they didn’t want to be.

“You doing alright?” he asked. He was looking at the food options rather than at me, selecting things with the efficiency of a man who’d been hosting for hours and was finally getting around to eating. “How’s the night been?”

Casual. Genuinely casual, with the ease of someone asking because they actually wanted to know rather than because the occasion required it. It caught me slightly off guard, which probably shouldn’t have been surprising given that the past several days had not featured much in the way of casual.

“I know what you did,” I said.

He looked up from the food. “What did I do?”

“With Dan,” I said. “The pregnancy. The very full plate.” I watched his face. “You defended me. And Ivory. You knew that Ivory saying what she said to Dan’s face could turn into a formal complaint – a healer insulting a visiting Alpha at an official event, he could have made something of that if he’d wanted to. And you preempted it by making it impossible for him to complain about anything Ivory said without drawing attention back to the fact that you’d already publicly acknowledged all of it in front of every visiting delegation.”

Kael was quiet for a moment. He selected something else from the food table and added it to his plate with the deliberate focus of someone buying themselves time to decide how honest to be.

“He tried to belittle you,” he said finally. “I was heading over when Ivory got there first. She handled it faster than I could and significantly better than I would have, which—” a pause that might have been amusement, “-I’ll admit is true more often than I usually acknowledge out loud. What I did was the little I could do after the fact.”

“It wasn’t little,” I said. “Dan left early.”

“Yes,” Kael agreed. “He did.”

“And your pack nearly gave themselves internal injuries trying not to laugh,” I said.

The corner of his mouth moved. “They have practice. Shadowmere people develop significant restraint over time out of pure necessity, because the alternatives involve either wars or the pack reputation becoming something we’d rather it wasn’t. They’ve gotten very good at the specific face of *I am not reacting to this.*”

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“The woman near me was staring at her sleeve so hard I thought she was going to burn a hole through it,” I said.

This time the mouth movement made it all the way to an actual expression. Brief, but real. “Mira,” he said, which I took to mean he knew exactly who I was describing. “She has excellent restraint. Usually. She nearly failed it twice tonight and I saw both instances.”

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