Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 409

Chapter 409

Chapter 409

Chapter 409

ARIA

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We left the clinic at half past eleven.

Not because there was nothing left to do there – there was plenty left to do there, Nina had a list that was going to take days to work through and the healer had a chart that needed updating and Ivory needed the thirty-five hours of monitoring that she’d finally agreed to – but because Kael had reached the point where staying in the room was doing more harm than good.

I’d watched it happen gradually. The folder on the table with its color-coded tabs. The word waterboarded sitting in the air. Sexual harassment, with the specific note about the structural support and the fall. The number sixty-nine, and the subset of thirty that Ivory had handled herself, and the one hundred and twenty-six that Kael’s wolf had dealt with without the man fully understanding what he was dealing with.

Each item had added something to the stillness in Kael that wasn’t the good kind of stillness. Not the controlled authority stillness. The other kind the compressed kind, the kind that had weight and temperature and was looking for somewhere to go.

Ivory had fallen asleep with her books and her bottle and her thirty-five hours, and the room had gone quiet around her, and Kael had stood from the chair and walked to the door without a word and Nina had caught my eye and tilted her head toward the corridor.

We followed him out.

He didn’t speak in the main building. Walked through the corridors with the pace of someone who had a destination and was getting to it, pack members registering his approach and finding excellent reasons to be elsewhere. Not because he was doing anything threatening – his expression was controlled, his movement was controlled, the Alpha was completely in place on the surface.

But Shadowmere people were good at reading what was underneath the surface. They’d had years of practice.

We came out into the grounds and Kael turned toward the training complex and kept walking, and Nina fell into step beside me at a pace that matched his without matching his energy.

“How bad,” I said quietly to her.

“He’s been holding it since the waterboarding,” she said. “Maybe since the branding.”

“He held it through the whole account,” I said.

“He’s had practice at holding things,” she said. “The practice is not always a good thing.”

The training complex was mostly empty at this hour – the morning sessions had finished and the afternoon ones hadn’t started. The main training hall, which was used for the heavier work, had a section of the far wall that was concrete construction rather than the timber used elsewhere in the complex. I’d seen pack members work against it during intense sessions.

Kael went directly to that wall.

He hit it once.

1/3

1:46 pm

Chapter 409

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The sound it made was not the sound of a fist against a wall. It was the sound of something structural meeting significant force – the specific cracking that concrete made when its tolerance was exceeded from a single impact. The section of wall in front of him was not a section of wall anymore. It was a collection of fragments on the floor and a gap in the structure and a cloud of dust settling in the morning light.

He stood with his fist extended, breathing.

“Kael,” Nina said. “Control your wolf.”

“He has a mind of his own,” Kael said, withdrawing his hand and examining it with the clinical detachment of someone checking for damage. No damage. “We are not one person. You know that.”

“I do know that,” Nina said, with the patience of someone who’d had this specific conversation before. “But causing structural damage to the training complex alerts pack members that something is wrong. The complex is used regularly. Someone is going to come in here and see a wall that looks like that-” she indicated the gap, “-and draw conclusions.”

‘Something is wrong,” Kael said.

‘Something is wrong,” Nina agreed. “And the way we handle something being wrong in Shadowmere is not by advertising it hrough architectural damage before we’ve decided what to do about it.”

Kael turned from the wall and walked to the bench along the opposite side and sat on it. Not with the careful control of someone choosing to sit – with the motion of someone whose body had made a decision about needing to be lower to the ground.

followed and sat at the end of the bench. Nina stood, which was how she existed in situations that might require quick

movement.

‘Ivory,” he said, to the floor. The word came out with the specific weight of someone who’d been carrying a name and its mplications for the past two hours and was setting it down briefly just to feel what their hands were like without it.

Neither of us said anything.

‘I knew how she was,” he said. “I’ve always known how she was. She deals with her problems herself. She handles things and she keeps going and she doesn’t tell anyone what it cost because telling people what it costs is not-” he stopped. “It’s not how she operates. I knew that going in. I understood it years ago.”

‘Yes,” Nina said.

‘So I understood,” he said. “That she was looking for a cure. I understood she was taking risks I didn’t fully know about. I understood she was moving through channels that weren’t official and encountering people who didn’t want her to have what she was looking for.” He looked at his hands. “I understood all of that. In an abstract way. In the way you understand something when you haven’t seen the documentation with the color-coded tabs.”

“The documentation was thorough,” Nina said.

“She color coded it,” he said. “The severity of each incident. Organized by date. Cross-referenced with outcomes.” He looked up. “She treated her own poisoning and went back to work the same day and filed it under incident seven with a yellow tab which apparently means moderate severity, and the incidents above it that got red tabs-” he stopped.

“The branding,” I said.

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