Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 432

Chapter 432

ARIA

Elite arrived at the office door at the ninety-minute mark.

She came with a folder – thinner than the morning’s folder, more targeted, the product of focused intelligence work rather than comprehensive documentation. She also came with an expression that I’d learned to read as Elite’s version of a difficult situation: composed, operational, with the specific quality of someone who’d found what they were looking for and didn’t entirely like what they’d found.

Kael had unbolted the office door approximately forty minutes after our corridor conversation. He’d come out looking like someone who’d won a significant internal argument through sheer stubbornness – the wolf quieter, the man present, both of them worn at the edges. He’d sat behind his desk. We’d arranged ourselves in the office with the specific efficiency of people who’d decided that sitting on the floor was the previous stage of the evening and this was the next one.

Jordan had found a chair. Nina had her notebook. I’d taken the corner position near the window that gave me sightline to both the

door and Kael.

Elite came through the door and didn’t sit.

‘Five possible locations,” she said, opening the folder. “Based on the teleportation signature pattern, cross-referenced with the ncident files, cross-referenced with known facilities associated with the people in Kael’s documentation.” She spread five sheets on the desk. “Three are within a day’s travel. Two are further-one significantly further, one borderline.”

Kael was looking at the sheets with the flat operational focus he used when he was reading intelligence and not yet drawing conclusions.

‘Confidence level on each,” Nina said.

‘Distributed,” Elite said. “Twenty-three percent on the most likely. Twelve on the least likely. Nothing significant enough to make a single choice obvious.” She paused. “We have limited time. Every hour that passes-”

‘I know,” Kael said.

‘The five locations can’t all be checked sequentially without the delay becoming critical,” Elite said. “We need more information to narrow it.”

“What else do you have,” Kael said.

Elite paused for exactly one second – the pause of someone deciding how to present something they knew was going to land badly.

“Damon Blackwood,” she said.

The office went a specific kind of quiet.

Kael didn’t move. Didn’t change expression. The stillness of something that had gone past the reactive stage into something colder.

“He was sighted,” Elite said. “Near the third location on the list. Within the last forty-eight hours. Reliable source – pack intelligence from the southern territory, cross-checked against two independent reports.”

“Damon,” Kael said. His voice was the flattest I’d heard it.

“Near the third location,” Elite said. “Which is a facility that appears in the documentation folder under two of the red-tab incidents.” She held his gaze. “He has a presence in the network. Possibly peripheral, possibly deeper. We don’t know the extent.”

“Of course he does,” Kael said.

He picked up the glass on his desk. It was empty-had been empty since we’d come into the office. He looked at it for a moment and then set it back down with the careful precision of someone choosing not to break it.

“Aria’s ex-boyfriend,” he said, and the words were not directed at me, were not asking anything of me, were just the flat statement of someone naming a thing they didn’t want to be naming. “Has to be in this.”

“He has reasons,” Elite said.

“He has multiple reasons,” Kael said. “I’m aware of the reasons.”

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