Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 454

Chapter 454

Chapter 454

Chapter 454

KAEL

We parked the car a quarter mile from the facility.

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This was Elite’s call – the approach road had surveillance at the three-hundred-meter mark, and arriving by vehicle would give them approximately ninety seconds of warning, which was ninety seconds more than I wanted them to have. A quarter mile through dark terrain was preferable to ninety seconds.

The terrain was scrubby and uneven, the kind that caught on your boots and made noise if you weren’t paying attention. We moved in single file because the path between the parking

Elite in front reading the point and the facility’s perimeter was narrow enough to require it route, Nina behind her, Jordan behind her, two defense rotation members at the back, me in the middle.

―

In the middle because the wolf was present and wanted to be in front, and the wolf in front of this particular approach was not the optimal tactical arrangement.

—

a research installation of The facility looked like what it claimed to be from the outside some kind, two-story structure, secondary building behind it, lights in several windows that were the yellow-white of functional indoor lighting rather than anything designed to communicate habitation or welcome. A fence at the perimeter that was more about marking than about stopping anything serious.

The serious stopping was presumably inside.

We stopped at the perimeter fence and I looked at my team.

“There are witches inside,” I said.

Four faces looked back at me in the dark.

“I’m not asking anyone to-” I started.

“No,” Nina said.

“I’m just saying—”

“No,” Jordan said.

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Chapter 454

“If anyone wants to wait in the car,” I said, “I completely understand the-”

Nobody moved.

Nobody even shifted their weight.

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I tried again. “These are not regular witches. These are people who have been running an operation for years, who have power that operates differently from what we usually deal with. The curse-” I stopped. “I’ve encountered witches before. The specific encounter I had was the reason I spent three years as a wolf and cost my pack the mindlink, and I’m just acknowledging that if anyone—”

“Kael,” Nina said.

“Yes.”

“Do you smell that?”

“Smell what?”

“Exactly,” she said. “Because I smell something.”

I looked at her.

“Something,” she said, “that smells distinctly like a scaredy cat.”

“I’m not ” I started.

“It’s quite strong,” Jordan said, from behind her.

“I am not scared,” I said. “I’m being considerate of my team’s-”

“We’ve heard about the witches for three years,” Elite said, from the front of the line, still looking at the facility like someone calculating entry points. “We heard about them when you got cursed. We heard about them when Ivory started tracking the curse’s origin. We’ve been hearing about them for three years, Kael. We know what we’re walking into.”

“And we’re walking into it,” Nina said. “So can we please walk into it.”

“Also,” Elite said, “this is a rare opportunity. Ivory is in that building. Which means we get to go in there and rescue Ivory, which means we get to look at her afterward and say, ‘we rescued you, you were in distress and we came and rescued you. Do you understand what this means?”

“It means-” I started.

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“It means for the first time in Ivory’s entire life, we get to use the I told you so,” Elite said. “I told you so, you should have told us, we could have helped, and now look, we helped. I have been waiting to say those words to Ivory since approximately the second year of the curse and this is my window and I am not waiting in the car.”

Jordan coughed. “Elite has been looking forward to this.”

“I’ve been looking forward to this,” Elite confirmed, without any pretense.

I looked at the four of them in the dark

—

Nina with her expression of someone who’d already

had this conversation and won it before it started, Jordan with the specific suppressed amusement of a man who’d grown up with me and knew the exact shape of my anxiety about magic users, Elite with the focused certainty of someone who’d identified the priority objective and was ready to execute, the two defense rotation members with the fresh professional attention of people who’d been brought specifically because they were the best at what they did and were not going to let Elite and Nina down.

“Alright,” I said. “We go.”

“Finally,” Elite said, and started moving.

The first guard was at the secondary gate.

He was attentive – I gave him that. He was facing the right direction and maintaining proper visual coverage of his sector, which was more than a lot of guards managed on night rotation when nothing had happened for a while. The problem was that proper visual coverage of a sector in the dark against four people who’d been trained specifically for this kind of approach was still insufficient.

I took him down without noise.

–

—

The wolf did most of the work. Not a full shift I’d never be able to bring him back quickly enough to maintain the operation’s pace but the specific partial engagement that I’d been developing over three years of the curse adjusting my relationship with the wolf’s abilities. Faster than human. Quieter than the animal. The combination of both without the full cost of either.

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