Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 531

Chapter 531

KAEL

"I can't tell the pack to treat him well," I said. "I can't ask that of them. They know what he is and what he did and they have every right—"

*I'm not asking you to manage the pack,* the wolf said. *I'm asking you to talk to your brother.*

The word landed differently than it had before. Not the specific word that Killian had said as a teenager — the version that had felt, when I'd found out the truth, like an manipulation, like something that had been said knowing what it meant and choosing to weaponize it. The word the wolf was using now was the clinical version. The biological fact of it.

Half-brother.

"He's not—" I started.

*He's the child of the same man,* the wolf said. *That's what he is. What you do with that is separate from the fact of it.*

I stood up from the bench.

The wolf settled back into the background warmth, the active argument done, the space now mine to act in or not act in as I chose.

I stood in the garden and thought about the secondary clinic and what was in it.

I thought about Ivory saying *he has a lot of nerve* with something underneath the words that was not entirely contempt.

I thought about Aria's hand extended toward the vine and the ease with which she'd let something be what it was.

I thought about twelve years of a person being outside the only home they'd known, and what that did to someone, and whether I'd ever seriously considered what it had been doing.

I'd been right to exile him.

I'd been right and the exile had been the right length and the thing he'd done with his exile was his own responsibility and none of that changed.

And I was also the Alpha of this pack.

And the Alpha of this pack had a pattern, which was standing by the people in his circle even when it was difficult and even when the people in his circle were difficult and even when the standing by cost something.

He wasn't in my circle. He'd never been in my circle.

He was my brother.

Half.

The wolf, from somewhere inside the architecture of my chest, said nothing. Just waited.

"Fine," I said, to the garden.

I went to the secondary clinic.

---

I found him in the secondary clinic's recovery room.

The door was open, which surprised me. I'd expected it to be closed in the way it had been closed all week — not locked, but shut with the specific quality of someone who was maintaining a boundary because the boundary was all they had. The door was open and Killian was at the window, looking at the eastern garden.

He heard me. He would have heard me from the moment I turned into the secondary clinic corridor — his wolf was still active in ways that mine wasn't fully, the rogue's relationship with their animal half being different from a pack wolf's, and his senses were correspondingly sharper. He'd known I was coming before I'd reached the door.

"You're not inviting me back," he said. "That's not what this is."

"Not today," I said. "Today is just the acknowledgment."

"That I've been exiled for years for something that was partially my fault," he said.

"Yes," I said. "And that you've suffered long enough for it."

He was quiet.

The wolf, in my head, was doing something it hadn't done in a long time — the settled quality of an animal that has been waiting for something and has finally gotten it. Not triumphant. Settled. The difference between the two was significant.

"My mother," Killian said.

"I know," I said.

"When she died," he said.

"I know," I said.

"I was the reason," he said. "I know that. I've known that for—" he stopped. "She made a bad choice. She made choices. But I was the one who had to live with being the reason." He looked at the window. "I've been living with that for a very long time."

"Yes," I said. "I know."

"I became my father in other ways," he said. "The things I did in the network. The choices I made because they were convenient." He paused. "I was trying to find somewhere to belong and I picked somewhere that didn't care about anyone belonging anywhere. They used me. I let them use me because being used felt like being needed and I'd forgotten what being needed for good reasons felt like."