Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 527

Chapter 527

KILLIAN

Ivory was a different category. Ivory talked to me when medical necessity required it and otherwise treated me with the professional courtesy of someone who had complicated feelings about a situation and was managing them by being competent rather than warm. It wasn't cold. It was extremely controlled.

Which was its own kind of signal.

My wolf had opinions about the signal. My wolf had opinions about Ivory that I tried not to examine too carefully because examining them produced feelings that were easier to leave in the category of *not right now* and were significantly harder to process when fully acknowledged.

She was my fated mate.

I'd known it since I was eighteen. The specific moment — her walking into a room in the previous Alpha's pack house, me seeing her and feeling the pull of it like a physical thing, and then understanding what the pull was and understanding immediately that this was going to be complicated in ways that simple was never going to touch.

She'd been younger. I'd waited. That was the thing I'd done right in the middle of a long list of things I hadn't done right — I'd felt it and I'd said nothing and I'd waited because she was not yet eighteen and I was eighteen and the bond was new information that I needed to hold until she had the same information to hold.

She'd never gotten it. Her wolf had gone quiet along with everyone else's in Shadowmere when the mindlink broke. She couldn't feel the pull. She'd grown into someone who was thoroughly, completely, heartbreakingly in love with Kael — and I'd watched that from the outside too, which was its own specific education in the geography of feeling things you couldn't fix.

I hadn't helped the situation by what I'd done afterward. The network, the cooperation, the years of being in a place I shouldn't have been for reasons I'd been telling myself were about survival and that I was starting to understand had also been about something else — about being connected to the story in some way, even the wrong way, rather than being nowhere.

My wolf circled when I thought about this. The wolf was less patient than the person. The wolf processed the fated mate situation with the simple urgency of an animal that knew what it knew and couldn't understand why the resolution was taking this long.

*She's right there,* the wolf communicated, in the non-verbal way wolves communicated internally. *She's thirty feet away. Every time we're in the same building.*

*She can't feel it,* I responded, in the non-verbal way people communicated back. *Her wolf is quiet. She doesn't know.*

*She knows,* the wolf said. *She's choosing not to.*

This was possibly accurate. I didn't know how much of the bond Ivory could feel with her wolf infrastructure functioning at reduced capacity. I didn't know how much the healer's knowledge of bloodlines and fated bond mechanics had told her that the direct wolf-sense couldn't. She'd said herself, in the basement, that the bond told you who the person was but love had to be built.

She knew who I was. That was the most charitable reading of her behavior toward me. She knew what I was to her and she was making specific choices about what to do with that knowledge.

The choices were: treat the injury, maintain professional distance, process everything else at whatever pace felt survivable.

I could respect that. I was trying to respect it.

The wolf was less respectful.

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