Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 554

Chapter 554

ARIA

We were in the corridor outside the dungeon.

Ivory was breathing in the specific way of someone who'd done something that had taken significant force and the force was not entirely physical. Her nose was bleeding — I noticed that before she did, the slow dark line starting under her left nostril — and she was holding herself with the posture of someone who'd been running on will and the will was entering its final stretch.

Kael went to her.

"Are you alright," he said.

He said it quietly. The same way he always said things to her, the register that had no audience in it, that existed only between them. She looked at him and some of the cold thing in her expression — not released, but set aside, the specific setting aside that she did when she was cataloguing the present situation rather than continuing to process the past one.

"I just started a war," she said.

"I mean," Kael said, with the tone of a man trying something, "anyone could have done that."

"Anyone?" Nina said.

Kael looked at Nina.

"Help me out," he said.

"She killed two people," Nina said, "out of anger. She decided, in the space of approximately seven minutes, that they no longer deserved to continue living. She did not take the time to consider alternatives. She stabbed Vela in the stomach in the middle of a taunt. You tried to stop her before she went in and she glared back and you took a step backward. A whole Alpha."

"I was being cautious," Kael said.

"She's telling them game on," Nina said. "She declared war. With a dagger. In a dungeon."

"I do kill people," Ivory said, with the quiet flatness of someone stating a professional truth.

"Yes," Nina said, "but there's the Ivory version of killing people, which involves significant personal cost and survival by sheer stubborn refusal to die, and then there's this, which was — you walked in and stabbed her before she finished the sentence."

"She was going to say something annoying," Ivory said.

"She was going to say something annoying," Nina confirmed, "and your response to that assessment was a dagger to the stomach."

"She had it coming," Ivory said.

"Everyone who ends up on your bad side has it coming," Nina said. "That's consistent. What's new is the timeline between the provocation and the response."

"The timeline was—" Ivory started.

"Killian nearly died," Kael said.

He said it simply. Not an accusation — a statement. Ivory went still.

"Yes," she said.

"In your clinic," he said.

"Yes," she said.

"While you were there," he said.

Ivory looked at the wall. The specific look of someone who was doing an accounting and not finding the numbers manageable.

"He's fine," Kael said. "He's going to be fine. Jordan's with him." A pause. "You got it out."

"I should have found it earlier," she said. "During the initial examination. When he came through the gate. I should have—"

"It was designed to be undetectable," Kael said.

"Designed by people I've been fighting for years," she said. "I should have—"

"Ivory," he said.

She looked at him.

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