Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 514

Chapter 514

ARIA

Kael was conscious. Jordan and Nina had gotten him into a sitting position against the far wall, away from the debris. He was shaking less than he had been, the compound's forced shift settling, the body recalibrating. He was looking at the room with the expression of someone who was remembering in pieces — getting fragments of what had happened and putting them together in the wrong order.

"What happened," he said. His voice was rough. "Ivory. Are you hurt—"

"I'm fine," she said, automatically.

"She's bleeding," Killian said, from beside her. Not accusatory — stating a fact, the specific urgency of someone who'd seen the injury and was noting that it required attention.

"I know I'm bleeding," Ivory said. "I'll deal with it."

"Your hand," Killian said.

"I'll deal with it," she said again.

"Ivory," Kael said, and his voice had the quality of someone who was still in pieces but was holding himself together specifically enough to say the name.

She looked at him.

Something moved through her face — the professional composure doing its work, the held-back tears pressing against it, the relief that he was present and conscious and himself visible in the specific way relief was visible when you'd been afraid for someone.

"I'm fine," she said, to him. Softer. "I'm fine. You're fine. We're fine."

"I didn't—" he started.

"You weren't in control," she said. "It wasn't you. It was what they did to the root."

"I could have—" he said.

"You didn't," she said. "We're all here. Nobody is dead. The lab is—" she looked at the lab again, and something moved through her face that she pulled back quickly, "—the lab can be rebuilt."

"Ivory," Kael said.

"I know," she said.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"I know," she said.

I was sitting on the floor. I'd come to be on the floor at some point during the aftermath without quite tracking when — the specific decision of a body that has been through a lot and would like to be lower to the ground for a while. Jordan was beside me, having determined that the wall was adequate support and was leaning against it with the cuts on his face and the bruises already starting to show.

"Are you hurt," he said to me.

"No," I said.

He looked at me.

"Really," I said. "Ivory pushed me out of the way before he got to me. And then—" I thought about what Ivory had thrown, what Nina had done with the glass, what Jordan had done with the baseball bat that was now in pieces on the clinic floor. "Where did you get a baseball bat," I said.

"I've had it for two years," Jordan said.

"Why," I said.

"Because during the curse years," Jordan said, "sometimes the wolf got past the door. And regular weapons either hurt people too much or not enough. A bat is—" he looked at the broken bat on the floor, "—was a middle option."

"It didn't work," I said.

"It almost never works," Jordan said. "But it made me feel better."

I looked at the broken bat. At the pieces of Ivory's worktable. At the window that was now gone. At Killian, who was sitting beside Ivory and was bleeding from the reopened injury and the new ones and hadn't said anything about any of them because he was checking Ivory's hand with the specific focused care of someone who was not going to stop checking until he knew the extent of it.

Ivory let him. That was the thing that struck me. She let him look at her hand and check the head injury and assess the damage without telling him she was fine or redirecting or using the clinical voice to create distance.

"You're bleeding on the floor of your own clinic," Killian said, "which is ironic and also a medical concern."

"I'm aware of the irony," Ivory said.

"Let someone treat you," Kael said. His voice was steadier now. The shaking had mostly stopped, the compound's effect settling. "Please. Let someone—"

"Fine," Ivory said. The word came out with everything in it — the exhaustion of someone who'd been holding things together at significant personal cost and had reached the end of what holding things together was going to accomplish tonight.

"Fine," she said again, quieter. "Fine."

She let Killian help her up from the floor.

She let Nina guide her toward the treatment area.

She let herself be treated instead of treating.

I sat on the floor of the destroyed lab with Jordan beside me and Kael across the room, and the full moon was outside the window that no longer existed, and somewhere out there the people who'd done this were watching to see if their plan had worked.

It hadn't worked.

Barely. It had barely not worked.

But we were all still here.

Silver, in my head, was warm and present and not saying anything because some moments didn't need commentary.

The lab could be rebuilt.

We were still here.

That was what mattered tonight.