Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 513

Chapter 513

ARIA

Another wolf came through it. Smaller than Kael's wolf but present and fast and moving with the specific direction of something that had a purpose. It hit Kael's wolf sideways, off Ivory, the two animals crashing into the far clinic wall together.

They fought.

It wasn't the casual engagement of a challenge — it was the specific fight of an animal trying to protect something, the new wolf putting itself between Kael's wolf and the rest of the room with a consistency that told me what I needed to know about what the new wolf was doing.

Killian. Still in full wolf form from — when? The injury? The monitoring had him in the secondary clinic. He'd been resting, or we'd thought he was resting, and apparently he'd been aware enough of what was happening to come through a window.

Nina was at Kael, both hands on the wolf's ears, talking fast and low. Jordan had pushed himself off the wall and was helping hold. The two wolves had separated — Killian's wolf had Kael's pinned in the corner, weight and position keeping the larger wolf still, but it was taking everything Killian had to maintain it, the strain visible in every line of the wolf's body.

Ivory was moving toward them.

Her hand was bleeding. Not a small cut — the kind that came from the broken table edge or the broken glass, and she'd been hit at some point in the tumbling and there was blood at her temple, a thin line of it bright against her skin. She was holding the emergency compound in her good hand, and she was not walking with the steady pace of someone who was fine. She was walking with the determined pace of someone who was not fine and was doing it anyway.

She reached the corner.

Killian's wolf held Kael's position by what looked like will more than weight.

Ivory jabbed the compound into the wolf's side.

The sound Kael made was not the wolf's howl. It was somewhere between and it was wrong in the way that things were wrong when something was being forced, when something was fighting what was happening to it with every resource available and losing.

The wolf form broke.

Not cleanly. Not the smooth transition I'd seen on the lower slope when the fight was done and the wolf was standing down. This was the compound doing something specific — forcing the shift back, overriding the wolf's decision to stay in the form, pulling the man to the surface while the wolf fought every inch of it.

Kael screamed.

Nina and Jordan were there the moment he hit the floor, Jordan pulling the jacket he'd apparently grabbed from somewhere and wrapping it around Kael before he'd fully stopped moving. Kael was shaking. The specific full-body shaking of someone whose system had just been forced through something extreme, whose body didn't know what had happened to it and was trying to process everything simultaneously.

Killian shifted back. He did it the hard way — the rogue wolf's shift, without the mindlink support, the same way I'd seen Andrew do it in the hall before I'd built the link. It cost him. By the time he was human again he was on one knee, and the injury from the network's compound was worse than it had been, the wound having reopened during the fight.

He went to Ivory immediately.

I could see it. Not the trying-not-to-cry of someone who was embarrassed by the emotion — the specific attempt of someone who'd been holding things back for so long that the mechanism was automatic, who was deployed it now even though the mechanism was at its limit and was not going to hold much longer.

Her lab. Years of work. And Kael had come through it like it was made of paper, directed here, aimed here, sent by people who understood that destroying this space would destroy something specific about Ivory.

"Those moon witches," she said, and her voice came out low and controlled and furious. "They activated the root. They pushed it — forced it to the surface. Sent him here."

"Here specifically," Nina said. She was in security-chief mode now, the compensating set aside, the assessment running.

"Here," Ivory said. "To us. Aria was here. I was here. They used him as a weapon and aimed him at the people who—" she stopped. "They wanted us dead or they wanted him to do something unforgivable. Either outcome served them."

"How," Jordan said. "How did they activate it? We've been watching for—"

"Full moon," Ivory said. "The root was always more accessible on the full moon. During the curse years we managed it, we had protocols, we knew the risk windows. Since the curse broke we haven't—" she stopped again. "We got comfortable. We forgot to be careful about the full moon."

"That's our fault," Nina said. "Not yours."

"It's everyone's fault," Ivory said. "We stopped watching."