Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 553

Chapter 553

ARIA

I made it," she said, without turning around. "Second year of the curse. After I removed the one from myself. I needed to be able to do it again if it came to that." She continued the organizing. "The channeling took three months. I had to do it in pieces because channeling moon-metal requires bloodline-adjacent energy and mine is adjacent rather than direct, so the intervals—"

"You made a weapon," Kael said.

"I made a tool," she said.

"Ivory."

She turned around.

"It was the second curse year," she said. "I'd just extracted a parasite from my own body with a regular knife that was nowhere near adequate for the job, and I'd survived it, and I needed to make sure that if it happened again to me or to anyone else in this pack I could actually do the job correctly." She held his gaze. "So yes. I made a weapon. That is what the second year was."

Kael was quiet.

"You didn't tell us," Jordan said.

"I told you what you needed to know," she said. "The knife existed and lived in the locked cabinet. If I'd needed you to know more, I'd have told you more."

"You removed a parasite from your own body," Nina said.

"Yes," Ivory said.

"Alone," Nina said.

"The relevant people were unavailable," Ivory said.

"And then you made a weapon," Nina said.

"A tool," Ivory said.

"Ivory," Nina said.

"It was the second year," Ivory said again, and the words had the specific weight of that period — the full weight, the weight that they'd all been carrying for years and that Ivory had been carrying in particular, alone, in ways they still didn't have complete access to. "I did what the second year required. That's all."

The clinic was quiet.

Killian, on the floor, said: "I would very much like to not be on the floor."

"You can be moved to the recovery table," Ivory said. "Carefully."

"Kael," Killian said, with the specific tone of someone requesting assistance from a person they were still calibrating their relationship with.

Kael looked at him on the floor. At the stitches. At the marks on Ivory's throat that he'd made with hands that hadn't been his.

He went to Killian.

He got him up.

Not with resentment — with the specific efficiency of someone doing a thing that needed to be done and doing it properly. He got Killian to the recovery table with Jordan's help and made sure he was positioned correctly and then stepped back.

Killian looked at him.

"Thank you," Killian said.

"Don't thank me yet," Kael said.

"For the wall," Killian said. "When I came in. You came in and you went for her first." He paused. "You always went for her first."

"Yes," Kael said.

"That's what you do," Killian said.

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