Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 472

Chapter 472

Chapter 472

Chapter 472

ARIA

“You’re going to document it,” he said.

“I’m going to document it later,” she said. “Right now I’m simply observing.”

“Ivory,” I said.

She looked at me.

“The runes,” I said, and held out my hands.

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The corridor light caught them clearly the markings on both hands, running from the wrists toward the fingers, the new settled visibility of something that had always been structural.

Ivory looked at my hands.

Then she looked at my hair.

Then she looked at my hands again.

Her expression went through several stages in rapid succession – the clinical assessment engaging immediately, the healer’s mind cataloguing what she was seeing and cross-referencing against four years of research and finding things that matched and things that exceeded the match and things that were entirely new and needed documentation. I

Then she pressed both of her own hands over her mouth.

Jordan looked at her. “Is she-”

‘She’s not crying” Nina said. “She’s containing something.”

“What’s she containing,” Jordan said.

‘The specific feeling,” Nina said, “of someone who spent four years tracking a bloodline and has found it at full expression and is trying not to make it about herself when it is very specifically also about her.”

Ivory took her hands away from her mouth.

“I need paper,” she said.

“We’re in a corridor,” Jordan said.

“Someone find me paper,” she said.

“Ivory-”

“The runes are the activation markers,” she said, with the focused urgency of someone whose professional excitement had overridden their ability to modulate it. “The full expression of the bloodline’s visible record – I’ve read about them, the documentation from the old packs described them but I’ve never seen them on a living person. I’ve been looking for them since I

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Chapter 472

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understood what the bloodline was.” She looked at me. “You have all of them. Both hands. The bond mark is here-” she pointed without touching, “-and the link mark here, and this one-” she leaned forward slightly, “-this one is the blood-bending mark. It’s documented in Aryada’s original research as something that would only appear in someone who’d fully accessed-”

‘Ivory,” I said.

-the deep register of the bloodline, which theoretically required-”

‘Ivory.”

She stopped.

She looked at me.

‘Later.” I said. “You can document all of it later. When you’ve slept more and the wrist has healed and we’ve had the conversations we said we were going to have.”

She looked at me for a moment.

‘The conversations,” she said.

‘The ones you said you were going to have,” I said. “The full version. All of it.”

She was quiet for a moment. The healer’s urgency dialing back, the other thing – the one that had been cracking, she’d said, the hings under sustained pressure finding their edges – coming forward instead.

“Yes,” she said. “Those conversations.”

‘When you’re ready,” I said.

‘I’m ready now,” she said, and the words had the quality of something she’d decided. “Not for the full version. For the beginning of t.” She looked at me with the expression that had no category – the one that dissolved all the clinical and the controlled and the managed versions into something underneath all of them. “I’m sorry, Aria. For the parts of this that were mine to be sorry for. And here are parts that are mine. I know that.”

The corridor was quiet.

‘I know,” I said.

‘I’m going to say more than that,” she said. “When we have the time and the space and I’m not on painkillers that are making the longer sentences harder to construct.” A pause.

“But the beginning of it is: I’m sorry. And you were right. And you are going to be a remarkable Luna. You already are.”

The runes on my hands caught the corridor light.

Silver, in my head, was warm and still.

The bond thread ran from my center outward, warmer than it had been an hour ago, warmer than it had been yesterday, the specific warmth of something finding its way toward what it was supposed to be.

“Book club,” Ivory said.

“No,” everyone said.

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Chapter 472

“I’m just saying,” Ivory said. “As a bonding exercise. Post-combat processing. There’s literature-”

“No,” Kael said.

“The themes are not exclusively-”

“Ivory,” Nina said. “No.”

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Ivory sighed. “Fine,” she said. “But when you’re all struggling with your feelings I will be in the library and the invitation remains open.”

Somehow, Sona’s voice had reached a register that was not quite raised but was absolutely authoritative, and Morrison’s responses had taken on the quality of someone who’d found themselves in an argument they hadn’t anticipated and was recalibrating.

“We should probably-” Jordan started.

“Let them sort it out,” Kael said. “Sona has it.”

“She does,” Nina agreed.

“We,” Ivory said, “should go eat something. I haven’t had a proper meal since yesterday morning and I am running on Margo’s compound and spite, and the spite is beginning to carry more of the load than is clinically advisable.”

Jordan opened his mouth.

‘Don’t,” Ivory said. “Whatever you were going to say about the spite being my primary fuel source on a normal day, don’t. It’s ‘unnier when I’m at full capacity.”

‘I wasn’t going to say that,” Jordan said, with the complete unconvincing quality of someone who was absolutely going to say that.

We went to find food.

All six of us, through the main building’s corridors and out into the pack grounds where the morning was continuing in its slightly- quieter-than-usual way, and the pack was doing its morning things, and people called to us when we went through, and the runes on my hands caught the sunlight.

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