Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 396

Chapter 396

Chapter 396

Chapter 396

ARIA

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We sat in the quiet of the quarters. The lamp at its low setting, the night outside the window, the pack grounds doing their late- night version of existing.

Something had shifted tonight. Not resolved. Not the clean resolution of things sorted and finished. But shifted – several things in new positions, new angles, finding new places to rest against each other.

The bond between us had carried something tonight. Had worked. Had brought him moving down a hillside in the dark toward where we were.

That was real. Whatever else was complicated, whatever the wolf’s older attachments and the eleven hours of waiting and the gaps in what Ivory would tell him and the attacker who’d escaped with information – that was also real.

I looked at my dressed forearm. At the shoulder, warmer now with the ointment.

Minor scratches. Healing before tomorrow evening, if Ivory’s estimate was right.

“You should sleep,” Kael said.

“You should check on Ivory before you sleep,” I said.

He looked at me.

“I know you’re going to,” I said. “You might as well do it now rather than lie awake thinking about whether you should.”

The expression that moved through his face at this was complicated and brief and then it was composed again. “She’ll be asleep.”

“You’ll check anyway,” I said. “And then you’ll know she’s fine and you’ll actually be able to sleep instead of knowing you need to check.”

He stood. Looked at me for a moment with the expression of someone who’d received accurate information from an unexpected direction and was deciding what to do with the receiving of it.

“Get some sleep,” he said.

“After you tell me one thing,” I said.

He waited.

“The wolf,” I said. “When he was with Ivory. The whine. The “I searched for the right word. “The good boy.”

He looked at the floor for a moment.

“She called him that,” I said. “And said she’d missed him. And he-“I stopped. “He knew her. In that form, he knew her completely. She didn’t have to earn it.”

“No,” he said quietly. “She didn’t.”

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Chapter 396

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“I know what that means,” I said. “I’m not asking you to explain it or resolve it or tell me it doesn’t mean what it means. I just-“1 paused. “I wanted to say that I see it. And that I’m not looking away from it.”

He looked at me for a long moment.

“I know,” he said. And this version of those two words was the one that had the most in it of all the versions he’d used tonight. The one that acknowledged what I’d said fully rather than partially. The one that didn’t paper over it.

He went to the door. Stopped with his hand on the frame.

“Ivory likes you,” he said. “She’d tell you she doesn’t. She’d find a clinical framing for it that maintained appropriate distance. But she does.” He didn’t look back. “She gave you scratches that heal overnight. She could have given you considerably more.”

He left.

I sat in the quiet and thought about that.

Then I lay down and thought about the anchor, warm and settled in my chest, and the bond that had carried a picture down a hillside in the dark, and what it meant that receiving it had made him move.

Sleep found me faster than I expected.

The morning was going to have eleven hours in it and then Kael was going to talk to Ivory, and whatever the gaps were, they were going to become visible.

But for tonight there was just this. The lamp at its low setting and the warmth in my chest and the forearm that would heal by tomorrow evening.

It was enough for now.

It kept being enough.

—-NEXT MORNING—-

I heard it before I reached the clinic corridor.

This was impressive given that the clinic was on the other side of the main building and I was coming from the east wing, which meant the noise had traveled a significant distance through solid walls and two sets of doors and was still arriving at a volume that made the pack member walking past me in the opposite direction raise their eyebrows and pick up their pace.

The noise was not one thing. It was several things layered on top of each other – a raised voice that I identified after a moment as Ivory’s, which was notable because Ivory’s voice was almost never raised in the way this one was, combined with something that sounded like a crash, combined with what I was fairly certain was Jordan saying something in the strained tone of a man who had taken on a task he hadn’t fully anticipated, combined with the specific sound of Nina conducting operations under pressure.

I moved faster.

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