Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 524

Chapter 524

ARIA

"You're my second," Kael said. "You're supposed to support—"

"In the circle," Jordan said, "you're Kael. Among the circle you are Kael, not the Alpha. And Kael deserved the headache."

"I support this," Nina said.

"I also support this," Ivory said.

"I had no opinion at the time," Elite said. "In retrospect, the headache was appropriate."

"Killian," Kael said, turning to him.

"Don't," Killian said. "I'm not involved in your circle dynamics."

"You're sitting in a chair in my office," Kael said.

"Under Aria's protection," Killian said. "I'm here because she permitted it. Which means if she withdraws the permission I'm technically not here at all. My opinions about the bat are not available."

"Coward," Kael said.

"Practical," Killian said.

"He's learning," Jordan said.

"Also," Kael said, redirecting with the energy of someone who'd been building this point for twenty minutes, "the bat was a preemptive strike. You used the bat before you had a reason. You admitted that."

"I knew I'd find a reason later," Jordan said. "And I was correct."

"That's not how justice works," Kael said.

"That's not how justice works," Jordan agreed, "but it's how Jordan works, and in the circle those are sometimes the same thing."

"You bought books with pack money," Nina said. "Jordan was correct."

"The books came later," Kael said.

"But they exist," Nina said. "He was vindicated eventually."

"I can't believe you people," Kael said.

"You haven't been able to believe us for fifteen years," Jordan said. "You know exactly who we are."

"I do," Kael said, and the specific quality of those two words had the genuine version of what they were supposed to have — not the managed Alpha and not the performance, the actual Kael who'd read Ivory's books aloud in a park thinking that the healer reading them might somehow help the wolf.

"The pregnant woman," I said, because I'd been holding this since the previous night and it needed to be said, "almost went into early labor."

The room absorbed this.

"We know," Nina said, with the solemn weight of someone acknowledging a significant outcome.

"If she had," I said.

"She would have had a very interesting birth story," Jordan said.

"Jordan," I said.

"Too soon?" Jordan said.

"The name," Nina said. "If the baby had been born—"

"Kael Did This To You," Ivory said, with the flat delivery of someone stating a logical conclusion.

"That's a very long name," Kael said.

"Nicknames exist," Ivory said.

"Kael D Junior," Nina said. "For short."

"KDJ," Jordan said. "Even shorter."

"You're all terrible," Kael said.

"We're accurate," Nina said.

"Both," Kael said.

Killian looked around the room. At Nina, who was writing in her notebook and also still laughing. At Jordan, who was writing in his notebook and looking satisfied. At Ivory, who'd gotten the books while Kael was distracted by the Killian conversation and was now holding book eleven with the expression of someone reunited with something they'd been separated from against their will.

At me, standing in the doorway.

"After the budget discussion," Ivory said.

"We need to know how they activated it," I said. "We need to know if they can do it again. We need to—"

"We know they can do it again," Ivory said, still reading the back cover. "Full moon conditions, the right witches, the right casting. They can do it again. Knowing that is not complicated."

"Then we need to know how to stop it from working," I said.

"That's more complicated," Ivory said. "That requires understanding the root's construction at a level that my research hasn't reached yet." She finally looked up from the book. "Which I was going to discuss today, actually. When the relevant conversations were finished."

"The relevant conversations," I said.

"The budget and the bat," Ivory said, with the patient tone of someone explaining something obvious.

"Right," I said. "The root. Which could be used to send Kael crashing through walls again. More urgently than the budget."

"The root," I said again, to the room.

"The root," Kael confirmed, with the resignation of someone who'd accepted that the meeting was going to happen in the order the meeting was going to happen in, which was not the order he would have chosen.

"Ivory," I said.

"What I know," Ivory said, setting book eleven down with visible reluctance, "is that the root is a remnant of the original curse's construction. It sits dormant most of the time. The full moon weakens the dormancy — not enough to activate it on its own, but enough that with the right external push from a practitioner who understands the construction, it can be forced active."

"The witches on Saturday," Nina said.

"Used the full moon window and a specific activating cast," Ivory said. "Which means they have someone in the network who understood the original curse's construction."

"Which brings us back to the origin," Jordan said. "The person who created the curse."

"Yes," Ivory said.

"Who we still haven't identified, because apparently we misidentified the actual witch who cursed Kael, before she died which means there was more than one caster and we have no idea how many are left or who they are" Jordan said.

"Who I was getting closer to identifying," Ivory said, "before I was kidnapped and my lab was destroyed by the same Alpha whose BL novel budget I'm contesting."

"Those are two separate things," Kael said.

"They occurred in proximity," Ivory said. "I'm connecting them."