Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 512

Chapter 512

ARIA

She was quiet again. Then she said: "Fated bonds don't generate love. That's the thing people get wrong about them. They tell you who the person is. They make the connection available. But you still have to build the love. You still have to choose it." She looked at the wall of the lab rather than at me. "In a perfect world, when I wasn't quite so broken, maybe I'd be curious enough to build it."

"You're not that broken," I said.

She looked at me with the expression that was both the healer's assessment and something more personal.

"I'm working on it," she said, and it sounded like something she was saying to herself as much as to me.

I opened my mouth to ask something else.

The howling started.

It came from outside, close enough to feel as well as hear — the specific sound of a wolf in full cry, not the way pack wolves howled in communication or patrol signals. This was different. This was the howl that had a color to it, something red at the edges, something that wasn't communication and wasn't celebration.

Ivory froze.

The color drained out of her face in the specific way that happened when a person recognized something that their body understood before their mind caught up.

She turned to face me and she shook her head — not a conversation, a warning. The specific shorthand of someone who didn't have time for words.

Then the screaming started outside.

Then the clinic wall came in.

I had a fraction of a second — the fraction where Ivory's body was already moving, already putting herself between me and the door — and then she shoved me sideways and Kael came through the entrance.

Not the way Kael moved when he was walking or running or even the combat-speed movement I'd seen in the facility infiltration. The other way. The full wolf form way, except this wasn't the wolf I'd seen on the lower slope with the amber eyes and the wolf intelligence behind them.

The eyes were wrong.

That was the first thing I registered. The size was right — the enormous black wolf, the presence that filled a room — but the eyes were wrong. The amber was too bright. Flat in a way that was different from threat-response flat. Empty in a way that the wolf on the lower slope had never been empty.

This was not Kael's wolf.

This was what had lived inside his wolf during the curse years.

It moved toward me.

Ivory threw something — one of the compound bottles, heavy, accurate, hitting the wolf across the shoulder hard enough to redirect its momentum. The wolf swung toward her instead and she yelled at me to leave, and I was already moving but not away, I was moving toward the worktable where I'd seen Ivory's emergency kit because I was not leaving her in here alone with this.

The wolf went for Ivory. She went under the table with the speed of someone who'd done this before — had lived this before, three years of being the only person in the room with the cursed wolf — and the table came apart around her. Wood everywhere. The wolf was methodical in a way that was worse than frantic would have been. It wasn't wild. It was directed.

The wolf looked at her.

Something shifted in the eyes. Just for a moment — a flicker of something that was familiar rather than empty.

Then it was gone.

Nina stabbed the broken glass into the wolf's side.

He howled and the howl filled the clinic and rattled things on shelves and I pressed my hands over my ears and then immediately lowered them because pressing my hands over my ears was not useful.

"Close the door!" Nina yelled at me. "Don't let him out!"

I went to the door. Pulled it closed. Pressed my back against it because it was the only thing available to press against it and my weight wasn't going to stop a wolf but it was what I had.

The wolf wheeled. Ivory had gotten out from under the destroyed table and was moving toward the emergency cabinet with the focused urgency of someone who knew exactly what she was reaching for and was not going to let the situation stop her from reaching it.

The wolf moved faster.

It had her pinned before she reached the cabinet. Both of Ivory's hands on the cabinet's edge, the wolf's weight above her, and I saw the moment when the wolf's head lowered toward her neck and I stopped thinking.

The window broke.