Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 490

Chapter 490

KAEL

Morrison had been looking for me since Tuesday.

I knew this because the pack grounds had a specific communication network that operated independently of the official walkie-talkie system and was entirely based on pack members telling each other things with their eyes. By Wednesday morning I'd received eleven separate eyebrow communications indicating that Morrison had been in a given location asking for me. By Thursday afternoon the count was seventeen and included two hand gestures that translated roughly to *he's heading toward the east wing* and one subtle head tilt that meant *he just left the main building, now is your window.*

I had used every window.

The situation was straightforward, which was exactly why it was complicated. Morrison wanted to apologize. I knew he wanted to apologize because Sona had told Ivory who had told Nina who had told Jordan who had, in the specific way Jordan had of conveying information he found mildly entertaining, mentioned it to me three times in three different ways over the course of two days.

Morrison wanted to apologize.

If Morrison apologized, I would have to accept it.

If I accepted it, the break was over.

This was the fundamental problem. The break had been, in ways I hadn't fully anticipated when I'd walked out of the council room with the team behind me, the best week of my life in recent memory. Not because nothing had happened — the usual pack business had continued, Elite's rotation had handled the border checks, Nina's systems had managed the communication network, Jordan had been doing whatever Jordan did with the intelligence files in the periods between Nina's office and apparently a botanical garden corner that I'd been told about secondhand and was choosing not to examine. Ivory had been in the clinic for two days and then in the garden for three and had apparently found approximately six things she needed to document about the pack's current state that she hadn't been able to document while she was being kidnapped or recovering from being kidnapped.

And I had been reading.

This was the thing I hadn't expected about the break — not the absence of responsibility, which was pleasant but which my conscience kept nudging at in the way of someone who knew the nudging was going to win eventually. The reading. The specific quality of having enough consecutive hours in one place to actually finish something rather than reading three pages before someone needed an answer to something.

The books had arrived yesterday. The shipment I'd ordered — carefully, discreetly, through a supplier chain that went through enough intermediate steps that the origin was not immediately obvious — had come through the gate at eleven in the morning and had been delivered to my office at eleven-oh-three by two very professional gate guards who'd received my instructions about the shipment and had executed them with the dedication of people who understood that their Alpha wanted packages delivered to the office rather than logged in the general delivery system.

I now had books seven and eight, which Ivory already had. Books nine and ten, which were apparently recent releases that had just cleared the distribution delay. And two volumes from a different series entirely that the supplier had recommended based on the purchase history, which meant the purchase history was now documented somewhere in the supplier's system and I was going to have to think about whether that was a problem.

Ivory would find out eventually. She found out everything. But she was currently occupied with the botanical documentation and the rune documentation and the several volumes of new research she'd started since the Aria situation had clarified things she'd been tracking for four years, and I estimated I had at least two more weeks before the supplier's records crossed her path.

Two weeks was enough for three books.

Possibly four.

I had been ducking Morrison while quietly reading novels and ordering more novels and pretending, with the specific dedication of a grown man who'd been Alpha for eleven years, that I couldn't hear him in the corridor.

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Thursday morning I nearly got caught outside the dining hall.

Morrison was coming from the east, I was coming from the west, and the specific corridor that connected both approaches had exactly one corner and no other exits. I'd made the corner before Morrison reached the intersection but it had been close enough that I'd spent four minutes pressed against the wall in the maintenance alcove waiting for his footsteps to recede.

I'd left my plate and gone back to the office.

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Thursday afternoon, three more eyebrow communications.

Thursday evening, one hand signal from a pack member near the residential wing that meant *he knows you went this way.* I'd redirected through the secondary garden path, which added eight minutes to the walk but had no other corridor intersections.

By Sunday morning, I'd accepted that this couldn't continue indefinitely and had begun working out the acceptable timeline for being caught.

Not today. Today the books were good and the break was still good and Nina was still not asking me questions about administrative matters.

Maybe Monday.

Monday seemed reasonable. The break would have been a full week by Monday. Morrison would have had a week to sit with the apology, which meant the apology would be fully fermented and ready to receive. A week felt like an adequate break. Sufficient to have rested, insufficient to have forgotten what resting felt like.

Monday, I decided, coming back to the quarters on Friday afternoon. Morrison today, apology accepted, break ends Monday.

I turned the corner into the corridor outside our quarters and noted Morrison at the far end of it, also turning a corner.