Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 332

Chapter 332

Chapter 332

KAEL

“Shh,” Jordan said, from near the ground. “She’s turning back.”

A moment. Then collective tension released.

“I feel like we’re all being very lazy today,” Nina said, returning to her previous position with the composure of a security chief who had definitely not just been hiding from a Luna.

Ivory made a sound that was close to agreement. “We almost collectively died. I was traumatized last night seeing Dan again.”

I suppressed a laugh. Suppressed it hard, in the specific way of someone who’d been doing this all evening last night and had apparently not yet recovered the capacity to manage it easily. My jaw tightened with the effort.

V

“It was a traumatizing experience,” Ivory continued, with the tone of someone reporting a medical assessment. “Dan couldn’t have come when I had amnesia. He waited until memory came back and then appeared to trigger my PTSD.”

h

Nina’s voice was carefully even. “At least you handled it well.”

my

“Only because there wasn’t a knife on the buffet table,” Ivory said. “Why did they stop removing knives from the buffet table? I’ve been meaning to ask someone about that.”

I turned to look at her. She was absolutely serious.

Jordan, still near the ground, said: “Because the last time there was one, you stabbed Dan with it.”

“He was groping me,” Ivory said, with the serene reasonableness of someone explaining why they’d opened an umbrella in the rain. “And tried to do significantly worse. And Kael was busy. It was a good use of my time.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, The image of Dan, of last night, of *congratulations on the new addition to your household* and underneath all of it the older image of Ivory with a buffet knife, which I’d dealt with at the time and processed and filed and apparently hadn’t finished processing.

“Why,” I said, “do we still have him as an ally.”

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Chapter 332

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“That would be your father’s treaty,” Nina said, in the tone of someone who’d answered this question before. “Which is binding and considerably complicated to exit without broader coalition implications.”

She paused. Then: “Oh. She just threw a rock at a target. With the magic.”

Everyone looked.

Aria had apparently shifted approaches – instead of the directed energy blasts, she’d picked up a training stone and was attempting something that involved the lunar power as a guidance mechanism, the silver light wrapping around the rock before it left her hand and then-

4

It hit the target squarely. Not the one she’d aimed at, but the one two positions to the left, which might have been intentional and might not have been.

“That’s,” Ivory said, and then stopped.

“Interesting approach,” Elite said, which was the specific word she used when she meant something more complimentary than she wanted to admit.

“I’ve just noticed,” Elite added, “that the patrol guards are here. And not patrolling.”

I looked. She was right. Two members of the morning patrol rotation were standing at the edge of the training grounds with expressions that said they’d stopped by briefly and then lost track of time.

“What’s the worst that could happen,” I said, more to myself than anyone.

The shrugs that moved through my assembled senior leadership were remarkably synchronized. Nobody moved to correct the situation. The patrol guards stayed where they were. We stayed where we were. Aria continued in the center of the grounds, working through something that was clearly progressing even if the progress was sometimes sideways relative to the intended direction.

I watched her and tried to be honest about what I was so

which was someone doing the work. Not performing the work for an audience – she still hadn’t fully registered the scope of who was watching her, or if she had she was doing an extraordinary job of not letting it derail extraordinary job of not letting it derail and trying them differently and occasionally producing something that made the watching pack members forget they were supposed to be subtle about watching.

her. Just doing it. Trying things that didn’ting an

–

That quality the stubborn, unspectacular willingness to keep going when the going wasn’t producing immediate results was something I recognized from people who eventually became genuinely capable rather than just occasionally impressive under pressure.

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Ivory had it. Had always had it. The reason her skills had reached the level they had wasn’t talent alone, it was the grinding daily accumulation of someone who treated every failure as information rather than judgment.

I was watching Aria and recognizing the same quality and not yet sure what to do with that recognition.

Aria finished her session and came over to where Ivory was standing.

I watched from enough distance to give the conversation space but close enough to hear the shape of it if not all the words. Ivory’s posture was the careful professional neutral she maintained when she was being deliberately even-handed – not warm, not hostile, the specific composure of someone who’d made a decision about how to conduct herself and was executing it with characteristic thoroughness.

They spoke for a few minutes. I caught fragments – something about the power, about control, about what the library texts had said versus what the actual practice was producing. Ivory asked a clarifying question. Aria answered it. Ivory said something that made Aria look at her hands and then try again with whatever she’d just been told, and the result was marginally cleaner than what she’d been doing before.

Even now. Even here, with everything between them, Ivory was being useful because Ivory was constitutionally incapable of watching someone struggle with something she understood and not offering what she knew.

I’d been expecting – I realized, watching this, that I’d been expecting something different from Ivory. More visible anger. More of the justified fury that had been present and readable since the memory restoration. She had every reason to let that anger govern how she moved through spaces that contained Aria. Nobody would have blamed her. The pack would have actively supported it.

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