Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 528

Chapter 528

KILLIAN

"Cautious about me specifically," I said.

"About what you carry," she said. "The wolf. The rogue status. The specific quality of someone who's been separated from a pack for a long time and hasn't fully settled into anything else." She looked at the compound I'd collected. "The correct amount?"

"The instructions were specific," I said.

"They were," she said.

We stood in the garden with the plants between us and everything else between us and the vine doing its cautious thing.

"Why did you come," I said.

"I check the garden daily," she said.

"You knew I was going to be here," I said. "The instructions you gave me, the time you gave them to me — you knew when I'd be here."

She didn't say anything to this.

"Ivory," I said.

"I wanted to see," she said, with the specific quality of someone who'd decided the honest version was worth the discomfort, "if the companion planting's response would tell me anything."

"And did it," I said.

"Yes," she said.

"What did it tell you," I said.

She looked at the vine. "That you're not settled," she said. "That you've been unsettled for a long time. And that the unsettled thing is looking for something to organize around and hasn't found it yet."

"It told you all of that," I said. "From retracting."

"I've been working with plants that read energy signatures for years," she said. "I know what the retraction means."

My wolf had gone very still. The specific still of an animal that has found something it recognizes and is trying not to spook it.

"The fated bond," I said. "You knew... before i told you in the basement."

"I've known for some time," she said. "The research into bloodlines and bonds — I've been tracking fated bond mechanics for years. My own situation is in the documentation somewhere whether I chose to put it there or not."

"When did you realize it," I said.

"When you showed up in the basement," she said. "I had suspicions before. The way you responded to certain things. But the basement confirmed it."

"The basement," I said.

"A fated mate," she said, with the clinical voice she used for things that were personal and she was managing the personal-ness of through the clinical, "experiences specific physical responses to a mate in danger. The way you responded when Vela pushed the issue — when she gave you the choice — that was consistent with a fated response, not a calculated one."

"I made a choice," I said.

"I know," she said. "Which is why you're here and not there." She looked at the compound in my hand. "Take it with the morning meal. Not the evening one. The evening interaction with the body's natural compounds creates a—"

"Ivory," I said.

She stopped.

"I'm not asking you for anything," I said. "I know the situation. I know where you are. I know what you feel and what you don't feel and what you've been through." I held her gaze with the specific effort of someone who'd been working on being honest in situations where dishonesty was easier. "I know that I'm the last person you were expecting this from and the worst possible timing and the most complicated version of complicated."

She was quiet.

"I'm not asking you to fix any of that," I said. "I'm just—" I stopped. Found the real version. "I've been watching this pack for a lot of years. From outside. And I know that I had a part in how that outside happened. I know what my existence cost." I paused. "I don't know how to make that right. I don't know if it can be made right. But I know that I came here because the alternative was worse and Shadowmere is the only place I've ever thought of as home even when I was banned from it."

The garden was quiet.

"That's not a claim," I said. "It's just the truth."

Ivory looked at the vine. At the garden she'd built. At the secondary section with its specific cultivated magic.

My wolf made a sound.

Not the pathetic sound from earlier. Something else. Something that was quieter and had been waiting to say something true.

I looked at the vine.

The vine was still retracted.

But at the very end of the closest tendril, barely visible, just at the tip of it —

The smallest movement. Not toward me. Just a small, cautious, entirely non-committal movement that was not away from me either.

My wolf noticed it.

I noticed it.

I didn't say anything. I took the compound and left the garden the way I'd come in and went back to the secondary clinic guest space that Nina had arranged with the specific efficiency of someone who'd made a decision and was executing it completely while expressing no warmth about the decision whatsoever.

The room was functional.

The pack was not friendly.

The butcher had opinions.

Martha had made the food and the food was good and I'd eaten it and nothing had happened, which was apparently the specific version of welcome available to me.

And in the botanical garden, a vine that had retracted from me had made the smallest possible movement that was not quite the opposite of retraction.

It wasn't nothing.

My wolf had decided it wasn't nothing.

I was choosing to agree.

A/n: Ngl, i dont like Killian but his backstory is so pitiful and emotional.