Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 555

Chapter 555

ARIA

Kael carried Ivory through the main building corridor with the specific efficiency of someone who'd done this before and didn't need to think about the route.

He hadn't put her down since the dungeon. Not to open doors — Jordan had materialized ahead of us somewhere between the dungeon corridor and the main hall, still with the intelligence files, and had been opening doors without being asked in the way Jordan did things that needed doing. Not to adjust his grip — he'd found the right hold immediately, the one that kept pressure off her injured arm and kept her head supported, and hadn't shifted it since. He moved fast without moving roughly, which was harder than it looked.

I followed with Nina.

"What happened," Jordan said, when we came through the clinic's main door. He was looking at Ivory and then at Kael and then at Nina with the rapid assessment of someone who'd left one crisis and arrived at another one and needed the briefing.

"She passed out," Nina said. "After the dungeon."

"The dungeon," Jordan said.

"She stabbed Vela," Nina said. "And Alaric."

Jordan stopped moving.

"She stabbed them," he said.

"With the dagger," Nina said.

Jordan looked at Ivory's unconscious face. At the dagger still in her hand, which Kael had elected not to remove on the grounds that removing it while she was unconscious was probably more dangerous than leaving it.

"Okay," Jordan said.

"We started a war," Nina said.

"We," Jordan said.

"Ivory started it," Nina said. "We were there."

"I was in the clinic," Jordan said.

"You were there in spirit," Nina said.

Jordan processed this. Then he turned toward the corridor. "I'll get Eliza."

---

Kael set Ivory on the main treatment table with the care of someone placing something irreplaceable on a surface they weren't certain was adequate. He stayed standing over her for a moment — the specific hovering of someone who'd completed the action they'd been focused on and hadn't yet transitioned to the next thing — and then he sat.

He pulled the chair close. Put his hand over hers — carefully, the one without the dagger, which was still loosely gripped in her right hand even in unconsciousness, which said something about the specific relationship between Ivory and the dagger that I filed away the way Silver had told me to.

Nina moved to the other side of the table.

She started with the visible injuries — methodical, the security chief's assessment, the inventory of damage. The bruising at Ivory's throat was visible now in a way it hadn't been during the crisis, when everything had been moving too fast for the eye to register individual injuries. The marks of hands. Killian's hands, though Killian hadn't been in there when it happened — whatever had been wearing Killian's face had those hands and had used them.

"She said it was just her and her stubbornness not to die," I said.

"Yes," Nina said.

Kael hadn't said anything. He was looking at the scar with the expression of a man who'd received information he was going to need significant time to process and was buying that time by being very still.

His hand tightened over hers.

"She never told us," Jordan said, from the doorway. Eliza was behind him — the pack healer, the one who'd been Shadowmere's primary medical resource for the years Ivory had been developing her own practice alongside the traditional one. Jordan's voice had the specific quality of something that had landed in a place it was going to stay for a while.

"When would she have told us," Nina said.

No one had an answer for that.

---

Eliza examined Ivory with the brisk efficiency of a woman who'd been Shadowmere's healer for thirty years and had seen most things and was not easily rattled. She checked Ivory's throat first — the bruising, the depth of it, whether anything underneath was compromised. Then the arm. Then the scar, which she examined without comment, filing it the way healers filed information.

Then she moved to Killian, who was awake now — had come back to himself somewhere in the corridor while Jordan was getting Eliza, the pitch-black eyes gone, his own face returned, the specific disoriented quality of someone who'd lost time and was trying to account for it.

She checked Killian's stitches. Asked him questions in the shorthand of assessment. Looked at his pupils. Then came back to the center of the room where the rest of us were waiting.

"Ivory," she said, "passed out from the combination of physical strain and the specific energy expenditure of the surgery. She held her own against a wolf with her hands and her healer's training and then performed emergency surgery on a suppressed patient. The nose bleed was the warning sign." She paused. "She'll wake up. She needs rest."