Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 357

Chapter 357

Chapter 357

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A/N: I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS! YOU GUYS ACTUALLY SUCCEEDED IN MAKING ME UPDATE JUST A DAY LATER WITH YOUR COMMENTS. I HAVE BEEN BATTLING, AGAINST YOU PEOPLE AND I’M BARELY HANGING ON FOR DEAR LIFE, LIKE WHAT? YOU GUYS ARE REALLY NOT LETTING ME BREATHE! I HAD TO WRITE THIS QUICKLY TO GIVE A GENERAL COMMENT. I NEED TO FIND PRO-IVORY SUPPORTERS. WHO SUPPORTS IVORY, PLEASE SHOW UP!!!

Chapter 357

ARIA

I hadn’t meant to be there.

That was the first thing I wanted to establish clearly, even just to myself, even just in the privacy of my own accounting of the morning- I had not gone to Ivory’s clinic with any intention of witnessing anything. I’d gone because I had questions. Specific, practical, technical questions about the lunar power that the library texts had stopped being able to answer, just as Ivory had predicted they would, and I’d decided that today was the day I’d take her up on the offer she’d made in the east courtyard.

Come to me when the texts stop being sufficient.

The texts had stopped being sufficient yesterday, during a practice session in which I’d attempted a technique described in the third restricted volume and had produced something that was close to what the text described but wrong in a way I couldn’t identify from the description alone. I needed someone who understood what I was developing from the inside

who could watch the attempt and identify the specific error – and Ivory was the only person in Shadowmere who had that knowledge.

So I’d gone to the clinic in the mid-morning gap between my own administrative work and the afternoon’s schedule. My guard was with me in the way she was always with me, close enough to be present and far enough to give the illusion of privacy that we’d both settled into as a functional arrangement.

The clinic’s main door was closed but not latched – it sat slightly open in the way that doors sat open when someone had gone through recently and not pulled it fully shut behind them. I raised my hand to knock.

And heard Kael’s voice from inside.

I should have knocked anyway. Should have produced the sound that would have announced my presence and interrupted whatever was happening inside and allowed everyone to arrange

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Chapter 357

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themselves appropriately before the conversation continued. That would have been the correct thing – the thing that respected the privacy of a space I hadn’t been invited into.

―

What I actually did was freeze. My hand still raised. The knock not yet made.

Because what I heard in Kael’s voice was something I hadn’t heard from him in the months I’d known him. Not authority – I’d heard that constantly. Not the carefully maintained composure of a man managing multiple things simultaneously. Not even the rare warm moments that emerged when his guard came down slightly in familiar company.

What I heard was raw.

The specific quality of a voice that had been stripped of its management layers by something large enough to require more of the person than the managed version could provide.

I should have knocked. I kept not knocking.

“You should have told me.” His voice, through the gap in the door. Not angry I’d braced for anger, had expected it given what little I understood of whatever was being discussed. But it wasn’t anger. It was something that sat below anger in the chest and was harder to move through. “Not because I would have made a better decision. You were probably right that I would have refused. But you should have told me anyway.”

Ivory’s voice, when it came, was doing the controlled thing. The professional composure applied to a personal conversation, the specific effort I recognized from watching her talk about things that cost her while maintaining the exterior of someone who had the cost accounted for.

“If I’d told you,” she said, “you would have refused. You would have let the curse continue progressing because you didn’t want to solve it at my expense, And you would have been wrong, and we both know that, but you would have been certain about being wrong, which is the worst possible version of you.”

A pause.

“Yes,” Kael said. “That’s accurate.”

“So I didn’t tell you,” Ivory said. “I decided. I wrote the letter. I arranged what needed to be arranged and I did it knowing that eventually you’d find out and eventually we’d have this conversation and I’d have to sit here and account for it.” Another pause, shorter. “I’ve been prepared to account for it since the moment I sent it.”

“I know,” Kael said. “I’m not asking you to account for it. I’m saying you should have told me.”

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Chapter 357

“Those are contradictory positions,” Ivory said.

“I know they are,” he said. “I’m allowed to have contradictory positions. I’m processing something.”

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Something shifted in the quality of what I was hearing – some of the controlled thing in Ivory’s voice changing texture. Like a wall that had been well-maintained and was showing the first signs that the maintenance was reaching its limits.

“I watched you disappear,” she said, and the words came out differently than the ones before them. Less precise. More immediate. “For three years I watched what the curse was doing to you, dividing you and your wolf counterapart, making them seperate entities stuck in one body, and I couldn’t — I couldn’t stop it and I couldn’t fix it and everything I could do was insufficient and in the third year I could see-” she stopped.

“Ivory,” Kael said. His voice had changed too. The raw thing becoming something else.

“I could see it getting faster,” she said. “The deterioration. In the third year the rate changed and I did the math, Kael, I’m a healer and I did the math and I knew what the timeline was looking like and-” another stop, longer. “I wasn’t going to watch you die. I wasn’t going to stand there being noble about not interfering and watch you disappear completely because the available solutions had costs I found personally difficult.”

“The available solution,” he said quietly, “had a significant cost to you personally.”

“That was my cost to choose,” she said, and her voice cracked on the last word. Just slightly. The first crack, the first place where the control had reached what it could hold. “That was mine. My cost. My decision. And I’m-” she stopped again, longer this time. “I’m not sorry I chose it. I need you to hear that clearly. I would make the same decision again.”

“I know,” he said.

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