Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 327

Chapter 327

Chapter 327

ARIA

―

Thirty-one people. At least four of them were children, which was the part that got me children who had been brought to the training ground early in the morning by adults who wanted to watch something, children who were now applying themselves to not looking at me with the specific commitment of children who have been told they can stay if they behave and are behaving with every fiber of their small determined beings.

A boy of perhaps ten was examining a fence post with his arms crossed and his chin tilted up, nodding slowly, the posture of a person completing a very thorough structural assessment.

His mother, standing beside him, was doing the same to an adjacent post.

“Very consistent grain in this wood,” she said thoughtfully. “Really quite remarkable. We should – yes. We should continue observing this.”

I looked at the fence post. It was a fence post. It had presumably been there for years and had previously attracted no particular notice.

I looked at the woman. She looked at the fence

post.

“Alright,” I said.

Nobody answered. Several people examined walls more intently.

“I know you’re all here to watch,” I said.

Silence. The east wall woman tilted her head slightly, as though she’d heard something interesting in the middle distance.

“I can see you,” I said. “All of you. There are at least thirty people on the perimeter of this training ground pretending to be interested in the infrastructure.”

A man near the north edge said, to his companion, “The gravel here is quite fine. Notice the consistency.”

His companion crouched down and examined the gravel. “Very consistent,” he agreed.

I stood there looking at thirty-one people pretending I didn’t exist while absolutely refusing to leave, and felt the particular sensation of someone who has lost an argument they hadn’t

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technically started yet.

The seven-year-old on her father’s shoulders finally looked at me. Just for a second. Her expression was the focused, serious expression of a child who had been given a mission and was executing it, and the mission was clearly *look at the shed* but she’d checked on me for one brief moment with the eyes of someone making sure the interesting thing was still there.

She looked back at the shed. She’d confirmed I was still there. She was satisfied.

I turned back to the training ground. Thirty-one people at my back, all of them deeply interested in walls and gravel and the structural integrity of wooden posts.

Fine.

I looked at what I could see of their faces in the reflection. They were watching. Every single one of them, in between elaborate performances of examining the wall, was watching. A teenage boy near the back had positioned himself at an angle that gave him a clear line of sight to the practice space while technically appearing to be in conversation with the woman beside

him.

Something shifted in

my chest that wasn’t the moon magic.

4

—

I wasn’t sure what they were here for. That was the honest truth of it. I wasn’t sure if they’d come to watch me fail to collect evidence of inadequacy that could be circulated after, to be able to say *I saw it, she tried to use the powers and couldn’t manage it* or if they were here for something else.

–

Something more like what Shadowmere people apparently did when they were interested in something but hadn’t decided yet whether they were allowed to be interested in it.

–

I thought about the celebration. About my name going up from the crowd scattered, uncertain, but real. About pack members who’d started conversations with me about the trials, genuinely curious about what I’d experienced. About the woman who’d nearly burned through her sleeve rather than laugh at a visiting Alpha, who’d been protecting Shadowmere but had still, in the protection of it, been protecting me.

Maybe they were here because a child of the moon practicing in the training yard was something worth watching. Not to mock. Not to collect failure, Just

–

to see.

I decided to act on that possibility and deal with the alternative if it turned out I was wrong.

I turned back to the dummy and stopped being small about it.

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The texts described something called *focusing through the pearl* – using the object’s capacity to anchor the energy as a way of giving it direction and consistency rather than letting it disperse or spike unpredictably. I hadn’t tried it yet, had been building toward it in the library sessions without wanting to attempt it in a confined space without proper clearance.

The training yard was a proper space. The dummy was there specifically to be destroyed.

I closed my left hand fully around the pearl and felt the warmth of both external and internal connect in a way that was hard to describe except as *together.* Like two currents meeting and becoming stronger than either separately.

I raised my right hand.

―

The silver-white came up faster than I’d expected. More intense than the shimmer. Not trial- intensity – not the desperate full-body brightness of the mirror chamber but significantly more than the careful quiet practice I’d been building toward. Something in between, which the texts had suggested was where controlled use actually lived if you could find it.

I directed it at the dummy.

–

The blast hit the center of the dummy and the dummy stopped being a complete object. Not dramatically not explosion, not fire. Just a clean, total impact that cracked through the packed material of it and left the thing listing sideways from its stand with a significant portion of its midsection simply no longer structurally intact.

The pearl cooled slightly in my hand, like something that had done work and was registering the effort.

Silence behind me.

—

Then a sound that started small and got larger · a cheer, sharp and genuine and quickly cut off, like people who’d started cheering and then remembered they were supposed to be looking at the wall.

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