Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 426

Chapter 426

ARIA

“The note says she didn’t come alone this time,” I said.

“More than one person,” Nina said. “Ivory fought with a damaged shoulder and her dominant hand incapacitated. Against more than one person with comparable power.” She stood. “And she still sent us away. Still chose to face it alone.”

Jordan appeared in the doorway behind Nina with the expression of someone who’d been running and had arrived to a scene that was worse than what they’d been running toward. He looked at the empty bed. At the sleeping healer. At the scorch marks.

“The security footage,” Nina said to him. “Get me the security footage.”

He was already moving.

The security room was three corridors away from the clinic – a small space, functional rather than comfortable, with the monitoring equipment that Shadowmere used for pack perimeter and key internal spaces. The clinic had coverage from two angles. The footage was there when Nina pulled it up.

We watched it.

vory on the bed, the books in her working hand, her expression the specific one I’d been learning- the one that looked relaxed and wasn’t, that had the thought underneath it.

She was watching the door.

This was visible once you knew to look for it. Her gaze kept returning to it. Not anxiously – not the visible checking of someone who was frightened. The calm periodic attention of someone tracking a timeline. Waiting for something at a specific time and monitoring how close that time was.

She watched Jordan leave.

Then Nina.

Then, when we’d been gone for approximately twelve minutes, she turned to the healer and said something. I couldn’t hear it- he footage had no audio from this angle – but I could read the shape of it. Calm. Not alarmed. The healer looked at something vory was holding the chlorophyll compound, which she’d kept from the side table somehow, palmed it during the morning while everyone was focused on other things.

The healer’s expression showed hesitation. Then Ivory said something else. Then the heater – looked away. An almost mperceptible movement but visible on the footage, the specific look of someone who’d been told something and was choosing not to examine it too closely.

The healer had known.

‘She told her,” I said.

‘She gave her the option,” Nina said, her voice carefully controlled. “She told the healer what was coming and gave her the choice.

The healer chose-”

“Not to fight it,” Kael said. The flatness was complete now. “The healer chose to be out of it.”

“She was protecting the healer,” I said.

The footage continued. Ivory watching the healer’s eyes close. Checking her own working hand, flexing it once, assessing. Reading something from the shelf beside the bed – she’d had the botanical guide at one point, but we’d taken it. She’d been reading something else. I couldn’t see what.

Then she set it aside and looked at the door and waited.

The light came first.

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