Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 530

Chapter 530

KAEL

Not that he existed. I'd told myself it was because he'd known and said nothing, and that was true, but it wasn't the full truth. The full truth was that every time I looked at Killian I saw the evidence that my mother's certainty had been wrong. That the fated bond she'd based her entire life on had been a lie in practice, regardless of what it was in principle.

And I'd exiled the evidence.

The wolf understood something I'd been taking fifteen years to catch up to.

Exiling Killian hadn't brought my mother back. It hadn't changed what the fated bond was or wasn't. It had taken the specific thing that Killian had needed — a pack, a place, the belonging that was everyone's birthright — and removed it from him as punishment for being born.

His mother's choices. My father's choices.

Killian had been a child.

So had I.

Neither of us had gotten to choose the situation we were in. We'd both had to navigate it from where we were, with what we had, and neither of us had navigated it well.

I had done to Killian exactly what I'd accused him of doing — I'd made a choice that served my own needs without regard for what it cost the person on the other side of it. I'd exiled him because the exile made me feel like I'd done something when there was nothing I could do about the thing that actually hurt. My mother was gone. Exiling Killian didn't fix that.

It just made him gone too.

*Killian needed a win,* the wolf said, quietly, on Saturday afternoon. *He came here instead of anywhere else. That was the beginning of a different choice.*

I sat with this.

*He saved Ivory,* the wolf said. *He chose Ivory over the network when it cost him everything he had. That's what choosing looks like when it's real.*

*I know,* I said.

*You know what choosing looks like,* the wolf said, *because you've been watching Aria do it every day for nine months.*

I was not expecting that.

*Don't,* I said.

*She chose this pack,* the wolf said, quietly, in the way the wolf was quiet when he was saying something he'd been building toward for a while. *She chose you. Every day. Without being chosen back properly. Without the full bond. Without the wolf's acceptance. She kept choosing and she kept building and she didn't stop.* A pause. *Killian came here. That's the beginning of the same thing.*

I stood in the training yard alone.

The drills were finished. The pack was doing its Saturday things around me, the specific ordinary quality of Shadowmere in a normal week, the kind of week we hadn't had for months and were slowly settling back into.

*You've been carrying the exile for fifteen years,* the wolf said. *You're tired of it. That's what the sulking is about.*

*I'm not sulking,* I said.

*The sulking,* the wolf said, *is about being tired of carrying it and not knowing how to put it down without it looking like you were wrong.*

*I was wrong,* I said.

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