Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 508

Chapter 508

ARIA

I found them in the corridor outside Nina's office.

This was becoming a recurring location for significant conversations in Shadowmere, which I'd noted and filed as something that said specific things about this inner circle and how it operated. When things needed to be processed, they came here. Not the formal council room, not the training complex, not the garden. The corridor outside Nina's office, which had the right combination of privacy and proximity to somewhere they could be quickly if something happened.

Silver had told me they were agitated before I'd gotten close enough to confirm it myself. Not the combat-alert quality — the other kind, the specific agitation of people who'd been present for something and had come away from it with feelings they needed to put somewhere.

I turned the corner and found all five of them arranged in the corridor in positions that communicated the agitation quite specifically.

Jordan was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and the expression of someone running an inventory of something he'd wanted to do and hadn't been able to.

Nina was pacing. Nina didn't normally pace — she moved with purpose or she was still. Pacing meant the processing hadn't finished.

Elite was in her corner position with her arms crossed and her jaw doing the thing I'd learned meant she was containing a response she'd decided was disproportionate for the current context but hadn't fully let go of.

Ivory had arrived before me. She was standing with the specific quality of someone who'd been in a stressful situation and was coming down from it in real time, the professional composure present but thinner than usual, the underlying landscape of her feelings visible through it in a way that was more accessible than anything I'd seen from her before the crack in the wall had started.

Kael was the still point in the middle of all of it, which I was coming to understand was his specific function in this group — not the calm version, not serene, but the fixed reference that everyone else's movement organized around.

He looked at me when I arrived with the warm quality that had been developing, and something in it also communicated that he was aware of the specific energy in the corridor and was managing it.

"What's happening," I said.

"We are," Jordan said, "discussing the situation."

"The Killian situation," I said.

"The specific aspect of the Killian situation," Jordan said, "where Kael got to put him through the gate wall, and Ivory got to punch him, and we got to—" he paused, searching for the accurate summary, "—stand there."

"You got to observe," I said.

"We got to watch," Nina said, on the return leg of her pacing. "Which is different. Watching is what you do when there's nothing available for you to do. We had things we wanted to do. We were prevented from doing them by the fact that Kael had already done it and Ivory had done it and the clinical space was—"

"The clinical space was a clinical space," Ivory said. "There are protocols."

"The protocols," Jordan said, "specifically excluded us from the part where someone got to put Killian through something."

"I understand," Nina said, pivoting, "that there are good reasons for those exclusions. I'm not arguing with the reasons. I'm noting that the outcome is that Killian has now been physically through one gate wall by Kael and physically against one clinic wall by Ivory, and the three of us have performed exclusively a spectator function in both instances."

"Four of us," Elite said. "I was also present."

"Four of us," Nina agreed.

"We could," Jordan said, with the deliberate neutrality of someone proposing something they were going to deny being serious about, "bribe Margo. To look the other way. For a period. During one of the monitoring checks."

"Margo's integrity is non-negotiable," Ivory said flatly.

"Margo likes Jordan," Nina said.

"Margo is professional," Ivory said.

"The companion planting," Nina said.

"Is irrelevant," Ivory said.

"Margo documented the companion planting," Nina said. "Which means she was paying attention to Jordan. Which means there exists a warmer-than-baseline—"

"Margo is not bribing anyone for Jordan to punch a patient," Ivory said.

"We wouldn't need to punch him," Jordan said. "We could just— make our grievances known. Physically."

"You want to gang up on him," I said.

"We want," Jordan said, "to express, in the specific language that this inner circle has occasionally found useful, that his presence here and his history with this pack and his choices over the past fifteen years have been noted and that the noting carries weight."

"The language being," I said.

I looked at Jordan.

"That's his offense?" I said. "He existed?"

"It's a significant offense," Jordan said. "Given the specifics of how he chose to exist."

"Wow," I said.

"The history," Nina said, stopping her pacing, "is considerable."

"I know the history," I said. "I've heard the history. His mother had an affair with Kael's father, who was the Alpha and should have known better, and Killian knew about it and didn't say anything. That's real. That's genuinely bad. And then there's the network cooperation, which is also genuinely bad." I looked at them. "But he's in the clinic because he betrayed those people to help Ivory, and people are trying to kill him for it, and you want to gang up on him."

"They're not wrong about the wanting to," Silver said, in my head.

"Not helping," I said, internally.

*I'm just saying it's understandable,* Silver said. *Doesn't mean they should do it. But understandable.*

Ivory had been quiet. She was standing with the expression of someone who was letting a conversation develop because she was still processing the version of it she'd been part of and hadn't finished the processing yet.

"We could," Kael said, and his voice had taken on the specific quality of someone testing an idea in the air before committing to it, "just throw him back out."

"What," I said.

"We look the other way," Kael said. "He leaves. The people hunting him continue hunting him. We didn't do anything. We just—didn't stop it."

"Absolutely not," I said.

The corridor went quiet again.

"He is under my protection," I said. "For the meantime. That's the position."

"Your protection," Kael said.