Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 526

Chapter 526

KILLIAN

The butcher made the gesture at me on Tuesday morning.

I'd been walking through the main corridor that connected the residential section to the dining hall, doing the specific walk of someone who understood they were on conditional terms and was being very careful about the conditions. My head was down. My pace was measured. I was occupying exactly as much space as was necessary and no more.

The butcher was coming the other way with a box of supplies. Large man, someone whose name I hadn't learned yet because learning names required interactions and my interactions in Shadowmere had been limited to the official ones. He saw me coming from about fifteen feet away.

He moved the box to one arm.

With his free hand, he drew his index finger across his throat.

Slowly.

While maintaining eye contact.

Then he picked up the box with both hands again and continued walking past me as though nothing had happened.

I stood in the corridor for a moment after he'd gone.

My wolf made a sound. Not a threat sound. Something closer to the wolf equivalent of a sigh.

I kept walking to the dining hall.

---

Martha was the one who delivered my breakfast.

This was not standard practice. Martha ran the kitchen with the organizational authority of someone who'd turned food production into both an art form and a power structure, and she did not personally deliver individual meals to individuals in the dining hall. She had people for that. Efficient people, well-trained, who appeared with plates at the right time and disappeared without requiring acknowledgment.

Martha brought mine herself.

She set it down in front of me with the specific care of someone placing something exactly where they wanted it, straightened up, and looked at me.

The look lasted approximately four seconds.

It communicated several things. None of them were warm. The combined message, as best as I could decode it, was: you are only here because someone said so, the someone who said so has enough credibility that I'm honoring it, this does not mean I agree with it, and the meal in front of you is nutritionally complete and contains nothing that will immediately harm you, and I want you to understand that the last part of that sentence was a choice I made and could unmake.

Then she went back to the kitchen.

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