Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 413

Chapter 413

Chapter 413

Chapter 413

ARIA

The afternoon was supposed to be quiet.

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That was what I’d been telling myself since leaving the training complex – that the morning had been enough, that the afternoon could be the kind that involved the Luna’s administrative backlog and a second visit to the clinic and nothing that required the specific focused attention that crisis demanded. The folder was with Nina. The list was being organized. Ivory was under thirty-five hours of prescribed rest with a healer, a plant, and a cabinet containing rope.

The afternoon could just be the afternoon.

was at my desk reviewing the inspection follow-ups that had accumulated during the clinic morning when I heard the commotion.

Not the training complex kind of commotion – not the deliberate, structured release of Kael putting holes in concrete. This was a different quality. The specific sound of something happening at the perimeter that hadn’t been planned for, carrying the particular nix of urgency and confusion that meant whatever it was hadn’t been anticipated.

And underneath it, audible even through the distance and the walls, something that sounded like a man using language that was ¡uffering from the specific emotional strain of a person who’d encountered something much worse than expected.

got up from my desk.

My guard was already in the doorway, having heard the same thing. We moved toward the main gate at pace, not running- unning communicated emergency to everyone you passed, and the commotion hadn’t reached emergency level yet – but moving with the intent of someone who needed to see what was happening.

We heard it before we saw it.

The plants had him.

vory’s botanical perimeter – the one we’d spent the morning realizing was a sedative-compound defensive system disguised as

order identification was not, it turned out, limited to sedative properties in all its components. The section near the east back wall, the part that was farthest from the main gate and closest to the maintenance approach that pack members rarely used, apparently had a different set of capabilities.

The vines were aggressive.

That was the only word for what I was looking at. The man in the middle of them had clearly attempted to enter Shadowmere through the back wall approach probably believing it was less monitored, probably believing that a healer’s decorative botanical perimeter was decoration and nothing more. What he’d found was vines that had opinions about uninvited entry

They’d wrapped him. That was the most precise description I could find. From the knees up, both arms secured against his sides, the vines themselves looking completely ordinary except for the fact that they were actively moving not the gentle drift of plant matter in a breeze, the purposeful tightening of something that had encountered a threat and was containing it

They’d also dragged him to the gate. Which was the part that was currently in progress as we arrived. The vines were pulling him. with the absolute indifference of botanical matter that didn’t care about dignity, across the approach path toward the main entrance.

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4:46 pm

Chapter 413

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The man was not taking this calmly.

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He was also clearly not small- tall, broad-shouldered, the build of someone who’d spent years doing physical work, wearing clothes that had been practical before the plants had gotten to them and were now significantly worse for the experience. His face was visible above the vine level and it was doing something complex- the specific combination of pain, outrage, and the dawning horror of a person who’d miscalculated a situation badly.

Nina was at the gate.

Jordan was beside her.

They were not helping the man. They were watching the plants deliver him to the entrance with expressions that were having a very difficult time staying in any category that could be described as professional.

“He said he was looking for the healer,” one of the gate guards said to Nina, with the tone of someone reporting information and also trying very hard not to be the person who started laughing first.

“For legitimate reasons,” the man said, from inside the vines, with the dignity of someone attempting to maintain a position that the circumstances were not supporting. “I’m here for legitimate reasons. I have an injury.”

“You came through the back wall,” Jordan said.

“I was lost,” the man said.

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