Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 558

Chapter 558

HALE

The fire had been burning since Tuesday.

Not literally. The fire in the Ashveil stronghold's main chamber was always burning — it was architectural, built into the foundation of the place when the coven had first established the stronghold three generations back, a continuous flame that the older members called the anchor and the younger ones had stopped asking about because the explanation went on for longer than anyone wanted to sit still for. The fire burned. It had always burned. It was not the problem.

The problem was that I had been sitting in this chamber since Tuesday receiving reports and every single report had been a variation of the same report, which was that Ivory Vance was still alive.

I stood up from the chair.

This was the third time I'd stood up from the chair in the past hour. The first two times I'd sat back down because standing up and pacing was something I'd told myself I didn't do anymore — it was the behavior of someone who'd lost control of the situation and was expressing that loss physically, and I hadn't lost control of the situation, I was simply — managing a complication.

I did not sit back down.

"Vela is dead," I said.

The room had twelve people in it. My senior council. The people who'd been with me since the beginning of the Ashveil network's current configuration, the ones who'd built the operations structure and run the cells and managed the specific complexity of coordinating across four territories simultaneously. Twelve people who were, individually, extraordinarily capable.

Collectively, apparently, incapable of resolving one problem.

"Vela is dead," I said again, because saying it again was the only way to communicate the full weight of what I was holding, "and Alaric is dead, and I received confirmation this morning that both deaths occurred in Shadowmere's dungeon, which means they were captured, held, and then killed by someone in Shadowmere's pack while we were—" I stopped.

"Hale," said the woman to my left.

"Don't," I said.

She was quiet.

Her name was Serath and she'd been running Ashveil's eastern intelligence operations for eleven years and she was one of the most competent people I'd ever worked with and she knew when to push and when not to, and this was a when not to.

"Four years," I said. "Four years, we have been trying to resolve the Ivory Vance situation. Four years of operations, of resources, of personnel, of—" I looked around the room at twelve faces that were all doing different versions of the same thing, which was receiving this information and not meeting my eyes directly. "Do you want to tell me why? Do you want to explain to me why this woman is still alive? Because I have been patient. I have been extraordinarily patient. I have allowed the timeline to extend because the operation against Shadowmere required specific conditions and rushing the conditions produced failures, and I accepted that, and I gave you the time. And what I received in return for giving you the time—"

"Hale," Serath said again.

"Was four years of documented failure," I said. "Sixty-nine incidents. Sixty-nine separate operations, some of them resourced at significant cost, some of them using personnel I cannot replace. And Ivory Vance is still. Alive."

The fire burned.

Nobody said anything.

I sat down.

"Tell me," I said.

He straightened. Not standing — Malen never stood for briefings, he sat forward with his forearms on the table and delivered information with the flat economy of someone who'd stripped everything from a report that wasn't load-bearing.

"The difficulty," he said, "is not that Ivory Vance is physically impossible to kill. She's human. She has human limitations — she bleeds, she sleeps, she can't heal herself the way a wolf heals, she can't outrun a shifter and she can't overpower one." He paused. "The difficulty is that she operates at a level that makes those limitations less relevant than they should be."

"Taking down Kael," Malen said, "was straightforward in theory. A cursed alpha, deteriorating, with a pack that had lost its primary infrastructure and was operating at reduced capacity. The curse was doing the work. We supplemented. We made it difficult for them to find solutions. We acquired the territory positions while Shadowmere was vulnerable." A pause. "Kael was the easier problem."

"Kael the Deranged," I said. "Who neighboring packs wouldn't touch with a ten-foot perimeter. That Kael was the easier problem."

"Kael had a wolf," Malen said. "And a wolf follows specific rules. It has specific vulnerabilities. It can be anticipated. It responds to stimuli in ways that can be mapped and countered." Malen looked at the fire. "Ivory has none of those rules and none of those vulnerabilities and does not respond to anything in ways that can be consistently mapped."

"She's a human woman," I said.

"She is," Malen said. "And she has been operating, for the past four years, in ways that suggest she has either found a way to bend the rules that apply to human women, or the rules that apply to human women are significantly more flexible than we've been accounting for."

"Explain that," I said.