Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 421

Chapter 421

Chapter 421

A/n: you guys asked for it, and I have exams tomorrow so pray harder for me, my last exam was horrible.

Chapter 421

ARIA

Vina’s instruction had been delivered with the specific clarity she brought to things that were not suggestions.

+20 Free Coins

‘Take Kael with you,” she said, while Ivory was listing the herbs she needed from the botanical garden and the modifications she wanted checked on the perimeter plants. “He’s going to go back to that corridor if he stays here.”

‘The oorridor is-” Kael started.

‘Has a person in it,” Nina said. “Who still has information we need. Who will have considerably less capacity to provide information f you go back to the corridor.” She looked at him with the expression she used for things she’d already decided. “Go with Aria. Help with the herbs. Don’t go back to the corridor until I’ve finished the preliminary questions.”

‘I wasn’t going to-”

‘You were absolutely going to,” Jordan said, from somewhere behind the documentation folder. “You’ve looked at the corridor door four times in the last twenty minutes.”

Kael looked at the corridor door.

‘Five times,” Jordan said.

Kael looked at me.

‘Herbs,” I said.

He looked at the ceiling briefly with the expression of a man making a decision about how much to push back on a situation and concluding that the answer was not very much.

“Fine,” he said. “Herbs.”

Ivory had given me her botanical guide – a well-used volume that had been annotated throughout with her compressed handwriting, additional notes in the margins, pressed plant specimens at several of the relevant pages. She’d been specific: the feverwort from the east bed, the nightbloom from the secondary garden section, the silver-leafed compound that she used in the lunar power treatments and that needed checking for damage from last night’s activities. Also the perimeter plants on the east back wall specifically the aggressive vines that had delivered Alric Vesper to the gate-to see if the encounter had damaged any of them.

“They’re self-repairing,” she’d said, “but the aggressive activation uses energy from the root system and sometimes they need additional support afterward.”

“Support how,” I’d said.

“The book has a section,” she’d said. “Pages forty-seven through fifty-one. There’s a specific compound. The ingredients are in the east storage shed.”

I had the book. I had the list. I had Kael, who was walking beside me through the early evening pack grounds with the residual

1/3

4:47 pm Ppp.

Chapter 421

quality of a man who’d had a very full day and was in the process of deciding how to carry the remainder of it.

+20 Free Coins

The botanical garden was on the south side of the pack grounds further from the main buildings, quieter in the evenings, the kind of space that generated its own atmosphere through the combined effect of a great deal of growing things and the specific quality of light that came through leaves at the end of the day. Ivory had been developing it for years. I’d been here twice before, both times for practical reasons, and had come away both times with the impression of something that had been built with intention rather than just accumulated.

It felt like her. The garden felt like Ivory – organized but not rigid, growing in specific directions for specific reasons, everything in it serving a purpose but the whole of it producing something that was more than the sum of its parts.

The east storage shed was unlocked. I found the compound ingredients on the labeled shelf where the book said they’d be, with the efficient labeling system Ivory applied to everything in her professional domain. I checked the list. Gathered the materials. Came back out to find Kael examining one of the border plantings with the expression of someone trying to apply the book to the physical object and finding the connection non-obvious.

“This one?” he said, indicating a plant that was medium height, dark green, with leaves that had slightly serrated edges.

I checked the book. “No,” I said. “That’s the common border grass. It’s decorative.”

“The book says the nightbloom has dark green leaves,” he said.

“With silver undersides,” I said. “Turn the leaf over.”

He turned the leaf over. Green underside.

“Wrong plant,” I said.

He looked at it for a moment with the expression of someone who’d been wrong about something and was deciding how to respond. Then he set it back and looked at the next one.

“This one,” he said.

I checked. “No,” I said. “That’s the perimeter sedative compound. Don’t touch it with your bare-”

He’d already touched it.

He looked at his hand. Then at me.

“How much did you touch it with,” I said.

“The back of my knuckle,” he said. “Briefly.”

“The book says brief contact has a delayed effect,” I said. “About an hour. You’ll feel slightly “I checked the relevant page,” relaxed.”

“Relaxed,” he said.

“That’s the technical term,” I said. “Ivory’s note says the effect is mild for wolves because of the metabolic processing speed. She’s added-“I squinted at the margin annotation, “-that Kael specifically has a high resistance to botanical sedatives due to prolonged exposure during the curse years and probably won’t feel anything.”

He stared at the annotation.

2/3

4:47 pm Pp p

Chapter 421

“She wrote your name in the margin,” he said.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify