Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 425

Chapter 425

ARIA

The clinic was quiet when we got back.

That was the first thing I noticed. The specific quality of quiet that was different from the quiet of a space that was simply empty – this was the quiet of a space where something had changed, where the absence had a shape to it rather than just being the neutral

absence of noise.

I noticed it before I registered anything specific. Before I saw the door standing open at the wrong angle, before I saw the healer, before I understood what the quiet was made of.

Kael went still beside me.

He’d felt it too. Not in the way I’d felt it – he’d felt it through whatever it was that Alphas felt when something changed in their- territory, the specific awareness that a space he was responsible for had been altered without his knowledge or consent. I saw it happen in him the subtle shift of someone whose entire attention had been redirected in an instant.

We went through the door.

The clinic was empty.

The bed was empty. The sheets were disturbed – not the settled disturbance of someone who’d gotten up normally, but the sudden kind, the kind that happened when movement was not voluntary and not gradual. The pillow was on the floor. The paper- wrapped books were on the floor beside it. The bottle, the botanical text, all the things that had been on the table were still there – not scattered, not as though there’d been a struggle over the table. The struggle had been around the bed.

The healer was asleep in the chair. Seated, head dropped to her chest, hands folded in her lap with the specific composure of someone who’d fallen asleep mid-task. The chart was in her hands. The calming plant was still on the windowsill.

Not natural sleep.

I knew what the difference looked like from Ivory’s descriptions – the specific quality of pharmaceutical-assisted unconsciousness versus normal sleep, the depth of it, the way the breathing was slower and more regular than it should be. The healer was breathing with the same slow regularity.

The chlorophyll. The sleeping compound the healer had brought in this morning as a last resort option. I’d seen it on the side table when I’d left for the garden.

The side table was empty.

Kael crossed to the bed in three steps and went down on one knee, looking at the floor underneath it. When he straightened he had a piece of paper in his hand. Small, folded once, no name on the outside.

He read it.

I watched his face.

Whatever was on it produced something in his expression that moved through several stages very quickly. Not the controlled processing of information – the raw immediate version, the kind that happened when something arrived too fast for the management layer to catch.

He handed it to me.

Ivory’s handwriting. The compressed efficiency of it, the specific pressure she used, present even in something that had clearly been written quickly.

*They were coming for me. The woman from the lower slope – she didn’t come alone this time. I couldn’t afford you getting hurt trying to stop them. I’m sorry.”

I read it twice.

The sorry at the end. Written by someone who’d known this was coming, who’d made a decision about it, who’d arranged for everyone to be elsewhere and used the chlorophyll on the healer and waited for what she knew was coming rather than letting it arrive while the people she cared about were in proximity.

Couldn’t afford you getting hurt.

She’d sent us to the garden.

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