Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 399

Chapter 399

Chapter 399

Chapter 399

ARIA

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Ivory was looking at Nina with an expression that was doing several things. The argument was still there – the layer of it, the professional justifications and the clinical positions and the completely accurate points she could make about rib recovery and wound margins and the adequacy of her self-treatment. All of that was present.

Underneath it was something else.

I’d heard it last night, through the clinic door, in the quality of her crying. The specific exhaustion of someone who’d been carrying things alone for so long that the alone part had become the only way they knew how to carry anything.

“You need to rest,” Nina said, and her voice had shifted. The security chief had stepped back slightly and what was left was the version of Nina that existed before the security chief – the person who’d grown up in the same house as Ivory, who’d sat with her through parents dying and curse years and amnesia and all of it. “You need to actually rest. Not the version you call rest where you’re lying down but reviewing case files and planning the next thing. Actual rest.”

“I have patients who-”

“Are covered,” Nina said. “Margo has them.”

“Margo can’t handle the-”

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“Margo can handle considerably more than you give her credit for,” Nina said. “She’s been handling things you think you’re handling for three months. She’s extremely competent.”

Ivory looked at her.

“You trained her,” Nina said. “You trained her for months. She’s good at this because you made her good at this. Let her be good at it for forty-eight hours without you standing behind her.”

Something in Ivory’s posture changed. Not collapsed – Ivory didn’t collapse, I was coming to understand that was simply not how she was built. But shifted. The rigid insistence of someone who’d been holding a position out of habit as much as conviction, finally allowing itself to find a different shape.

She looked at her wrist, secured to the bed rail with Nina’s rope.

“The rope,” she said. “Is still unreasonable.”

“The rope stays until you stop trying to get off the table,” Nina said.

“I’ve stopped,” Ivory said.

“You’ve paused,” Nina said, “There’s a difference and I know you.”

I moved to the chair nearest the bed and sat in it, because it was available and because sitting felt like a signal-I’m staying, I’m here, this is where I’m going to be for a while.

Ivory looked at me when I sat.

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10:49 am P

Chapter 399

“Don’t you have Luna duties,” she said.

“I rescheduled.” I said.

“You rescheduled your-”

“Margo helped,” I said. “She’s very efficient.”

Something happened in Ivory’s expression. The argument-readiness, finding no available target, beginning to subside.

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“The attacker,” I said, because the thing that had been in the room since Ivory had said ‘hunting me’ needed to be addressed rather than stepped around. “Eighteen months. What started it.”

Ivory looked at the ceiling. At the rope. At the window on the far side of the clinic that had a view of the pack grounds and the morning going about its business outside.

“She was protecting information,” Ivory said. “About the curse. About its origin and how it was constructed and who was involved in bu Iding it.” She paused. “I needed the information to understand what I was looking for. What kind of bloodline could break it and why the curse was structured the way it was. The information she was protecting explained both things.”

“You took it,” I said.

“I accessed it,” Ivory said, which was a distinction she clearly felt was meaningful.

“Without permission,” I said.

“Without her permission,” Ivory said. “The information wasn’t hers originally. She’d acquired it herself through means that were also not exactly consensual. So the moral architecture of the situation is more complex than-”

“She’s been hunting you for eighteen months,” I said.

“Yes,” Ivory said. “She has.”

“And the information you took,” I said. “The information about the curse’s origin. The person who created it. What did it tell you?”

Ivory’s gaze came back from the window and landed on me with the specific quality of someone arriving at the point in a conversation where the thing they’ve been deciding whether to say becomes something they have to say.

“That the curse wasn’t designed to kill him,” she said. “Eventually. Not at the end of the normal deterioration timeline.” She paused. “It was designed to transform. The deterioration is the first stage. The wolf taking over completely is the second stage. And the third stage-“she stopped.

“What’s the third stage,” I said.

“The wolf becoming something else entirely,” she said. “Something that isn’t Kael anymore and isn’t a normal wolf either. Something – constructed. Designed for a specific purpose by whoever made the curse.”

The room was very quiet.

“The attacker,” I said, thinking through what she’d said the previous night. “She said the curse would still kill him. That breaking it open hadn’t destroyed the root.”

“She was right,” Ivory said. “Breaking the curse through the bond stopped the deterioration. Stopped the progression toward the second and third stages. But the root – the original construction, the thing the curse was built from

that’s still there. Dormant.

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