Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 331

Chapter 331

Chapter 331

KAEL

I hadn’t planned to go to the training grounds.

–

a

That was the honest truth of it. My morning had been the kind that started with intention list of things that needed doing, meetings that had been pushed back during the Hunt week and were now stacking up with the patient persistence of problems that didn’t care about your personal circumstances and somewhere between my office and the first meeting, my feet had taken a different route without consulting me about it.

the

The training grounds were busy. That was the first thing I noticed, which should have told me something because the training grounds were always busy in mornings but not usually quite this busy, and not usually with this particular quality of activity that looked purposeful but wasn’t quite moving like people who had a specific goal.

The second thing I noticed was that a significant portion of my senior leadership was apparently spending their morning leaning against the wall on the far side of the grounds.

Nina. Elite. Jordan. And – which stopped me for a moment longer than the others Ivory, standing with Margo beside her, arms crossed, watching something in the center of the training space with an expression that I couldn’t read from this distance but that had the particular quality of focused attention she gave to things she found genuinely interesting.

Aria was in the center of the grounds.

—

She was working with the

power

the moon magic that had started manifesting during the Hunt, the thing she’d been reading about in the library’s restricted section for the past week. I could see the evidence of it from where I stood: small controlled bursts of luminescent energy, silver-white against the morning light, that she was apparently attempting to direct with varying degrees of success. A training dummy on one end of the grounds had seen better days. Several targets on the other end had been repositioned recently, judging by the drag marks in the packed earth.

She hadn’t noticed me yet. She was too focused on what she was doing, which was the kind of complete absorption I recognized from watching someone trying to learn something. genuinely difficult – the total attention of a person for whom nothing else in the immediate world was fully registering.

I walked toward the wall contingent.

A

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+5 Free Coing

–

the

Ivory saw me coming first. Nothing changed in her posture, but she was always like that shift in awareness visible only if you knew how to look for it, which I did. Nina registered me half a second later with the peripheral alertness that was simply how she existed in any space. Jordan turned around completely and gave me a look that said he’d been expecting me eventually.

“What are you all doing?” I asked, coming to stand beside them.

“Wall watching,” Nina said.

I looked at the wall. It was, as walls went, unremarkable. “Why?”

“The people are curious about her powers,” Nina said. “But too petty to ask.”

I looked out at the training grounds more carefully. She was right. The activity that had read as busy wasn’t random – it was clustered, arranged with the studied casualness of people who were definitely doing their own thing and definitely not paying attention to what was happening in the center of the grounds. A group of younger wolves who were ostensibly running drills had somehow positioned their drills to run in a consistent loop that kept the center of the grounds in their sightline. Three senior pack members near the equipment storage were taking an unusually long time selecting weights.

“Hence the wall watching,” I said.

“Hence the wall watching,” Ivory confirmed, not looking at me. Her eyes were still on Aria. “I only pray she’s not suffering from anxiety at being watched this obviously.”

“I can tell them all to leave,” I said.

Nina made a small sound that wasn’t quite dismissal. “And give them more reasons to not like her? They’re already here. They’re trying to decide if she’s worth their attention. Take that away and you’ve made the problem worse, not better.”

“They wouldn’t dare actually hurt their Luna,” I said.

“Indifference,” Ivory said, and her voice carried the flat certainty of someone stating a clinical fact, “is a significant pain to someone like her.”

I didn’t have an answer to that. Ivory had a way of identifying the specific shape of a wound that made arguing with her feel like arguing with someone who’d read the relevant text more carefully than you had.

We stood in a row and watched Aria work. A moment passed. Then another.

“This is ridiculous,” I said.

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