Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 414

Chapter 414

Chapter 414

Chapter 414

ARIA

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He was trying to look like a man who’d had a simple encounter with some uncooperative plants and was otherwise in ordinary circumstances. He was not succeeding. His clothes were wrong for a casual visit – too practical, too dark, too many pockets in places that suggested the pockets served a specific purpose. His eyes were doing the assessment that eyes did when they were calibrating threat and opportunity simultaneously. And despite the plant damage, despite the held hand, despite the general impression of a man who’d lost a physical confrontation with foliage, there was a quality to his stillness that wasn’t the stillness of someone in pain. It was the stillness of someone managing a situation.

The three fingers. The left hand.

I thought about the folder. About the color-coded tabs. About Incident One, which involved a collector, and three fingers, and Ivory accessing research materials without permission, and the collector sending people after her four separate times.

I looked at Nina.

Nina was looking at the man with the professional neutral of her most complete variety – the kind that gave nothing away about whether she’d recognized something or not. But her pen had appeared in her hand without me seeing her reach for it.

Jordan had taken a very small step sideways. Just one. The kind of step that repositioned a person relative to the exits in a space without making it obvious that exits were being considered.

The man looked toward the interior of the pack grounds with the interest of someone who knew what they were looking for and was orienting toward it.

‘The healer,” he said. “Is she available?”

‘She’s currently in the clinic,” Nina said, pleasantly. “If you’d like to come inside, we can direct you.”

‘That would be-” he started.

Kael appeared.

He came from the direction of the main building with Jordan at his shoulder – Jordan who was somehow both here and there, which I’d given up trying to track as a spatial impossibility particular to Shadowmere’s senior leadership – and his expression was the one from the training complex. The one that had come after the wall.

Except that expression had been the aftermath of processing something terrible. This expression was the active version.

He looked at the man. At the left hand. At the three fingers that hadn’t healed right.

The man looked at Kael.

Something in the man’s posture shifted – a micro-adjustment, the recalculation of someone who’d walked into a situation and was updating their assessment of it.

“Alpha,” he said. The word came out as an acknowledgment, the instinctive recognition of hierarchy, and it told me several things about who he was and how he operated.

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Chapter 414

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“Welcome to Shadowmere,” Kael said.

His voice was the one I hadn’t heard before. Not the measured authority of public-facing situations. Not the flat controlled version of contained anger. Something else – the version that was almost pleasant and was somehow worse than either of the others for

‘You’re here for the healer,” Kael said.

‘I have an injury,” the man said. His eyes were doing rapid calculations now.

‘Of course,” Kael said. “Come in. I’ll walk you to the clinic.”

Vina and Jordan were looking at each other. The look of two people having a complete conversation in silence and both arriving at he same conclusion simultaneously.

I can show him the way,” Nina said.

I’ve got it,” Kael said, pleasantly.

Kael,” Nina said.

It’s fine,” Kael said, still pleasantly.

The man hesitated for exactly the length of time it took to calculate that hesitating was worse than moving, and then he stepped side the gate. Kael fell into step beside him with the easy companionship of a host directing a guest, and the man walked with im, and the two of them turned the corner into the main building corridor.

lina and Jordan moved.

lot at a walking pace.

moved with them because whatever was about to happen in that corridor was something that someone with the authority of una should probably be present for, and also because I’d spent enough time in Shadowmere to recognize the expression that had een on Kael’s face when he’d said “come in* and I needed to see what it produced.

le came around the corner thirty seconds after Kael and the man had turned it.

ael had jumped him.

hat was the most accurate description of what I was looking at. The corridor was empty and short and had no exits from the ection they’d entered, and the man was on the ground and Kael was not on the ground and the man’s arm was – his arm was

rong. The angle of it. The way it was positioned relative to the rest of him.

ael’s eyes were amber.

Come on,” Kael said to the man on the ground, with the intense focus of someone entirely present in a moment. “Fight back.

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