Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 434

Chapter 434

ARIA

We were in the corridor outside the holding room, reorganizing around the information Vesper had provided and what it meant for Elite’s five location list – the third location now significantly elevated in priority, from twenty-three percent to something much more actionable when it happened.

The anchor, which had been quietly present throughout the evening as it always was, did something it hadn’t done before.

Not the sending direction. Not the reaching-toward-Kael quality that I’d used on the lower slope. The receiving direction. The one ‘d spent thirty minutes in the east courtyard trying to open and finding nothing through.

Something came through it.

Not words. Not even a picture – not the visual transmission I’d sent to Kael. Something more immediate and less organized than :hat. More like physical. Like being in the same room as something that was happening to someone else and feeling the impact of it through the shared space rather than the sensation itself.

–

Chains. The specific quality of something that constrained movement absolutely not the rope from the cabinet, not the securing of a cooperative person. The cold heavy weight of wolfsbane chains, which I knew from the texts and from training discussions and which produced a specific effect on anyone with wolf blood, numbing the connection between person and power and wolf simultaneously.

And pain.

The pain was the part that arrived last and was the loudest. Not my pain – I knew what my pain felt like, knew the scratch from vory’s training blade and the bruise from the shield gap and the various accumulated minor damage of the past several weeks. This was different. This had a different quality and a different origin and it was coming from outside me, through the anchor, through the bloodline connection that Ivory knew how to use from four years of studying it and had apparently decided to use now.

She was sending.

–

Not words. Not the deliberate organized transmission of someone choosing what to communicate this felt involuntary. Like something that was happening to her was leaking through the connection without being controlled, the strength of the experience overcoming whatever caution had been keeping the channel closed.

I screamed.

faster than the decision,

I didn’t mean to. The sound came out of me the same way the lunar blast had come out in the corridor the body responding to something the mind was still catching up to. The echo of Ivory’s pain hit me and came back out as sound before I could stop it and then I understood the danger of being connected to someone who was being hurt and I shut the channel down hard, the way you shut a door against a wind, both hands on it, all of my weight.

The silence after was very loud.

Kael was in front of me.

I didn’t know when he’d gotten there – he’d been several feet away and then he wasn’t. His hands were on my arms, steadying. and his eyes were doing the checking thing, the rapid assessment of someone looking for visible damage.

“What happened,” he said.

“She sent,” I said. My voice was not entirely steady. “Ivory. She sent something through the anchor. Not deliberately – it came through because whatever they’re doing to her-” I stopped. Breathed. “Wolfsbane chains. She’s conscious. She’s fighting whatever they’re doing. And she’s-” I stopped again.

“Tell me,” he said.

“Being shot at,” I said. “At range. Not the teleportation kind – the physical kind. They’re testing something. Or punishing something. Or both.” I met his eyes. “She’s in pain. Real pain. The shield might still be active-Aryada’s gift-but even with the shield at that level of sustained-”

“How long,” he said. “How long has it been since they took her.”

“Two hours,” Jordan said, from behind him.

“Two hours,” Kael said. “Two hours of-”

“We have the location,” Nina said. The operational voice. The one that moved things forward because backward was not a direction. “Elite has confirmation now, based on the anchor transmission aligning with the third location’s parameters. We have the access point information from Vesper.” She looked at Kael. “We can move.”

‘We move,” he said.

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