Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 440

Chapter 440

Chapter 440

Chapter 440

IVORY

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Vela arrived approximately an hour into my captivity, which I noted had been hours since I’d sent that message through the anchor to Aria.

The anchor transmission had been involuntary – a blast at close range, even with the shield, produced shock enough to push something through a connection I’d been carefully keeping closed. I’d felt it go out before I could stop it and felt, in the same moment, Aria receive it. Felt the pain arrive in her and heard, through some quality of the connection, her scream.

‘d shut it down immediately after that.

Not because I didn’t want help. Because if they could detect the power signature of the transmission – and the woman who’d been hunting me for eighteen months knew my abilities well enough to have that capacity – then sending anything out was giving them nformation about what I could do and who I could reach.

vory the healer was considerably more useful as a captive if they didn’t know she had a direct line to a child of the moon who was Currently sitting in a courtyard with the anchor open.

io: transmission closed. Information contained. Wait.

ela came in with the specific energy of someone who had a speech prepared and was going to deliver it regardless of the udience’s interest level. She was a tall woman, sharp-featured, with the kind of posture that came from years of believing herself mportant. The bandaging on her chest was significant – two crossbow bolts, wolfsbane-tipped, delivered by the traps I’d

repared on the lower slope.

felt absolutely no guilt about the crossbow bolts.

She started talking about how I’d ruined things. How I’d interfered. How I’d helped the enemy – the enemy being Kael, which was in interesting framing given that Kael had stopped their coven from sacrificing children, which seemed like the less sympathetic

ide of the conflict, but clearly we had different perspectives.

let her talk. People who were delivering speeches weren’t gathering information, and I was still gathering information.

Behind her, two others. Both with the specific quality of people who handled the operational aspects of situations like this one — not thinkers, not planners. Executors. They’d been taking turns with various approaches to making me indicate something they wanted me to indicate, and my face had been indicating nothing relevant to their purposes for two hours.

The blast they hit me with this time was mid-range. Not point blank – they’d learned something from the point blank attempt in the clinic, apparently. The shield took it. I felt the impact as the specific internal thud of something absorbed rather than deflected – energy going into the shield rather than through it, the gold warmth of Aryada’s gift handling the load.

I kept my face at bored.

“You know,” I said, “the documentation on blast-resistant magical shields indicates that repeated impact tests at varying ranges produce diminishing returns in terms of information gathered. If you’ve been trying to find the shield’s failure point, you’ve now established it isn’t at mid-range, which is information you already had from the clinic.” I looked at Vela. “What specifically are you hoping to determine?”

Vela looked at me with the expression of someone who’d expected a different response to being shot at and was recalibrating.

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10:57 am

Chapter 440

“You’re not going to beg,” she said.

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“I don’t beg,” I said. “It’s a professional position. I made it explicit policy approximately twelve years ago when a third-year medical student tried to convince me that conventional healing approaches were superior to what I was developing. I told him I didn’t beg for recognition of my work, and the principle has generalized.”

“You’re not scared,” she said.

“I’m concerned about the wolfsbane’s long-term interaction with my shoulder wound,” I said. “The compound’s mechanism of action affects vascular tissue regeneration in ways that aren’t fully documented in the literature. That’s a legitimate medical concern that I’d like to address when this situation resolves.”

“When this situation resolves,” she said.

“One way or another,” I said. “Yes.”

She hit me again. This time with something that wasn’t the standard blast – a different quality to it, something that was aimed at the shield’s edge rather than its center. Finding the geometry of it. The edge was where the shield was thinnest, the same way the left side of my training blast shield had been the weak point.

This person was smart enough to look for the edges.

Good to know.

I categorized it. Filed it. Kept my face at bored.

The tears were trying again. They’d been trying periodically since the first significant blast – the body’s response to pain at a certain threshold level, entirely involuntary, entirely unhelpful. I’d been forcing them back with the specific internal effort of someone who’d decided that crying in front of these people was not something that was going to happen today.

It would have been deeply uncool.

More importantly, it would have given them something. Any visible response gave them something. The clinical exterior was doing more work in this room than anything else I’d brought with me.

I thought about Kael’s face when I’d told him about the waterboarding. About the flat controlled quality of it, the way he’d been receiving something that was hurting him through the receiving.

Then the door opened and Damon walked in.

I wasn’t surprised. I’d suspected he was connected to this since the teleportation signature at the prison had become clear. The logic was straightforward: Damon had reasons to want me dealt with, this network had reasons to want me dealt with, and Damon had information about Shadowmere that the network would find useful. The trade made sense from everyone’s perspective except

mine.

He started talking about Aria. About how I’d manipulated him. About the decoy mating ground which, yes, that had been me. and I was not going to apologize for it because the alternative had been Kael dying from the curse, and my priorities were clear.

I yawned.

1

“You have a mate,” I said, when he paused for breath. “Sera. Who is currently in Shadowmere dying of silver poisoning, by the way. Your fated mate. Maybe focus on that.”.

Damon’s face did something complicated.

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10:57 am

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