Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 388

Chapter 388

Chapter 388

Chapter 388

ARIA

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The sound was not low this time. Not the sound he’d made toward Ivory. It was sharp and sudden and carried the specific warning frequency that made every animal instinct in a human body pay immediate attention. His teeth were visible. Not lunging-not attacking but present, and the message was completely unambiguous.

‘No.’

pulled my hand back.

‘Bad wolf,” Ivory said.

The wolf looked at her with an expression that I would not have thought possible on a wolf’s face – the specific expression of something that was being told off and knew it and was not entirely persuaded that it had been wrong.

‘Bad,” Ivory said again, with the patient firmness of someone who’d said this word to this wolf before. “That’s not how we behave.”

The wolf made a sound that was not an apology but was the closest thing to an apology that a very large predator in the process of not quite fully believing it had done something wrong could produce.

‘Apologize,” Ivory said.

The wolf looked at me. The snarl had gone. What was there instead was something I couldn’t easily read – not warmth, not hostility. More like a recalibration. The look of something that was reassessing.

He didn’t apologize, exactly. He looked away. Which, from this wolf, I gathered was the available version.

‘I’m fine,” I said, to Ivory rather than to the wolf. “It barely happened.”

‘It did happen,” Ivory said, “and he knows better.”

‘In fairness,” I said, “he also came down a slope at full speed and went through a power barrier without stopping to rescue you, so ‘m willing to extend some benefit of the doubt about the manners.”

vory looked at me.

‘That’s reasonable,” she said, which was as close to agreeing with me as she’d gotten in our entire acquaintance.

The wolf shifted.

I’d been watching from a distance that felt respectful – standing near Jordan, who was coordinating the perimeter check, while Nina and the guards got Ivory onto the stretcher with the careful precision of people who understood that their patient was going to have opinions about the process and were trying to minimize the friction.

The shift happened the way I’d read about but hadn’t seen up close-fast, unavoidable, the specific quality of something that was two things at once briefly before becoming one of them. The massive black wolf compressed and changed and became a man.

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0:48 am P

Chapter 388

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Kael.

He came into himself in stages – first upright, then steady, then present. The disorientation was visible. It lasted about fifteen seconds, the specific blankness of someone whose consciousness had been somewhere else and was returning to familiar territory and needing to reorient. His eyes moved around the flat ground, taking in the terrain, the guards, the stretcher, Nina crouching beside Ivory.

He was I should note, for the record, and then file the record somewhere private – not wearing anything. This was apparently standard for shifting and everyone present was behaving as though it was entirely unremarkable, which I gathered was pack culture around shifting and was a reasonable and sensible approach that I was also going to adopt immediately.

Jordan produced a folded set of clothes from somewhere with the efficiency of someone who’d done this before and handed them

over.

Kael dressed with the automatic movements of someone who’d had this handed to him enough times that the process required no conscious attention. His eyes were still doing the orienting work, the scan of the space, the Alpha assessment of what had happened and what the current status was.

‘What happened?” he said. His voice came out slightly rough, the way voices came out after shifting, the body remembering how to use vocal cords again. He looked at the stretcher. “Ivory – are you hurt?”

‘Nah,” Ivory said. “I just like lying on stretchers for fun.”

Kael closed his eyes for a brief moment. The expression of a man absorbing something.

He walked to the stretcher and crouched beside it with the movement of someone conducting an inspection that was also something else. His eyes moved over her quickly-the shoulder, the pallor, the controlled way she was holding herself even lying down.

‘The shoulder,” he said.

‘Dislocated,” she said. “Nina’s handling it.”

“How-”

“Bolt got through the shield,” Ivory said. “Aryada’s gift caught most of the impact but not all. The joint took the rest.” She looked at him with the expression she wore when she was managing his reaction to her being injured, which I gathered had some history. behind it. “It’s fixable. I’ve been walking on it.”

“Running on it,” Nina said, from the other side of the stretcher, without looking up.

Ivory didn’t comment on this.

Kael stood and turned around to do the full scene assessment, and his eyes found me.

He looked at me the way he looked at things when he was taking inventory quick, comprehensive, going from the scratch on my forearm to the bruise I could feel developing on my shoulder to whatever my face was currently doing.

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