Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 452

Chapter 452

Chapter 452

Chapter 452

ARIA

She fired.

I fired.

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The blasts met in the space between us and the collision was something I’d never experienced in training two significant power outputs hitting each other head-on, the pressure of it pushing back against both of us simultaneously. I felt the shield take part of it. Felt the anchor take the rest. Felt myself go back a step and hold.

She went back two steps and didn’t hold.

One of the pack wolves was there when she went back. Not attacking — just there, between her and me, its enormous presence ending the calculation of whether she was going to push for a second blast.

She looked at the wolf. At me. At the field behind me where the hostile force was fragmenting, the organized military movement becoming individual panic, Jason’s archers keeping the retreat from becoming a rally.

She looked at the thirty wolves that were looking back at her.

“You’ll regret this,” she said.

“Probably,” I said. “I regret quite a few things. This isn’t one of them yet.”

She teleported.

The specific light of it, the signature I knew from the clinic and the lower slope and the prison break intelligence, and then she was simply gone.

“Jason,” I said into the walkie-talkie.

“She left the field,” Jason said. “Tracking exit vector

–

northwest. Moving fast.”

“Track as long as you can,” I said. “I want everything we can get about the direction.”

“Copy,” Jason said. “Luna – they’re running. The main force is running.”

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Chapter 452

Through the link:

…

*Confirmed. Eastern retreat.*

*Western disengagement.*

*Center breaking.*

:

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“Let them run,” I said, to Santos and through the link simultaneously. “Don’t pursue past the boundary markers. Let them run and hold the line.”

*Hold the line,* thirty wolves confirmed.

One of them had something.

Not a blast, not a scream-adjacent attack. Something Ivory had mentioned.

Telekinesis. Blood-bending. The specific moon-adjacent power that operated only in full

– a child of the moon could moon conditions and appeared only in selective lineages theoretically produce it but Ivory had no documentation of anyone in living memory who

had.

I didn’t know what it looked like when it was being deployed against someone.

I found out.

—

The feeling was wrong in the way of things that were working on you before you’d registered them beginning a pull that was physical but not contact, like gravity had developed a specific opinion about me and was acting on it. My feet lost the ground. Not my feet specifically — my whole body losing the relationship with gravity that it was supposed to have, rising in a way I hadn’t chosen.

My concentration on the barrier slipped.

The barrier flickered.

“Luna.” Andrew’s voice, through the link, with an edge I’d never heard from him.

—

The two witches were focused entirely on me the blood-bending one sustaining the pull, the other preparing something targeted.

And then I thought about what Ivory had said, not the specific techniques but the principle underneath all of them. The anchor is the foundation. The anchor is what makes everything else possible. When you’re uncertain about the technique, go back to the foundation.

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Chapter 452

I found the anchor.

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The anchor was there. Warm, present, settled. It had been there through everything tonight through the link and the barrier and the blasts and the screaming and all of it. It was there

now.

I was a child of the moon. Ivory had spent four years searching for what that meant and finding me specifically. The bloodline was real, its properties were real, and one of those properties was documented somewhere in Ivory’s research as the ability to produce this exact effect.

If I could produce it, I could counter it.

The logic was imperfect. The training was nonexistent. The anchor was warm.

I reached.

—

Not outward inward. Deeper than the blast register, deeper than the scream, past even the place where the link originated. The place where the bloodline was its oldest and most fundamental.

1

The pull stopped.

–

Not because the witch stopped — she didn’t. Because I found the thing she was using and matched it, and when two forces of the same type act on the same object from opposite directions, the object goes nowhere.

I was standing on the ground again.

The witch who’d been sustaining the pull looked at me with the expression of someone for whom this had just become a different problem.

I lashed out.

–

The move was instinct the same way the blast in the corridor had been instinct, faster than decision, the anchor responding to threat and intent simultaneously. What came out wasn’t a blast and wasn’t a scream. It was the thing I’d just accessed from the bloodline’s deepest register, redirected the pull turned outward rather than inward, aimed at the witch who’d been using it against me.

She went backward.

Very fast.

Very far.

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Chapter 452

:

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The second witch, who’d been preparing the targeted attack, had a fraction of a second to reconsider her involvement before Santos arrived in her peripheral vision and made the reconsideration academic.

Through the link: thirty wolves receiving the image of what had just happened and processing it with the specific quality of a pack updating its assessment.

“She blood-bended a witch,” Priya said.

“She blood-bended a witch,” Andrew confirmed.

“Is that-” Sam started.

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