Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 560

Chapter 560

HALE

Petra looked like she wanted to ask a follow-up question and then looked at the rest of the table and decided against it.

"The physical capacity," I said. "You said she's physically active. Elaborate."

Malen shifted in his chair. "She participates in the pack's physical training. Not the wolf-specific drills, but the general conditioning and the combat disciplines. She's been doing this for — based on our intelligence, her entire tenure in Shadowmere, which is close to fifteen years. She's not a wolf and she doesn't fight like one, but she fights. She has specific techniques adapted for fighting against wolves that use their size and their predictive patterns against them." He paused. "In the second year, during the northeastern boundary operation, our field operative had a direct physical engagement with her. She's five foot four and weighed approximately fifty-five kilos at that point. Our operative was a full wolf, two hundred pounds, partial shift. She held the engagement for seven minutes before breaking contact and retreating using a prepared route through the botanical perimeter that our operative couldn't follow safely." Another pause. "Our operative had a dislocated shoulder. She had a knife wound to the forearm that she'd apparently treated herself before our intelligence confirmed the engagement had occurred."

"She treated herself," I said.

"While continuing to walk to her destination," Malen said. "Yes."

I stood up again.

This time nobody tried to stop me. I walked to the fire — the anchor fire, burning in its specific continuous way — and stood in front of it with my back to the room and processed what I'd just been told.

Four years.

Four years of operations against one woman. Sixty-nine documented incidents. Personnel lost, resources expended, supply chains disrupted, the death eater approach attempted and failed twice. Vela, who'd been running the primary field operations against Shadowmere, was now ash in a dungeon. Alaric, who'd been our best intelligence asset inside the northeastern territory network, was ash in the same dungeon.

Killed by Ivory Vance.

With the dagger.

In what Vela had apparently characterized, in her final transmission before entering the dungeon, as a visit rather than an interrogation. She'd walked in. She'd stabbed Vela before Vela finished speaking. She'd told Vela to send a message.

And then she'd gone two doors down and done the same to Alaric.

The message had arrived. I'd felt Vela's death through the coven connection — not the way the younger members felt it, with the full emotional weight of a bond severing, but the way I felt everything since taking the anchor seat, which was through the fire, through the network, through the thing that connected all of us and was one of the reasons the Ashveil network had survived for three generations.

She knew I'd feel it.

She'd sent the message knowing I'd feel it and had intended for me to feel it.

*Game on,* she'd said. *They want a war. I'll give them one.*

One human woman. No wolf. No supernatural capacity. A healer.

Standing in a dungeon telling us that she was declaring war on the network that had been trying to kill her for four years and had sixty-nine operations to show for the trying.

I turned around.

"Let me understand something," I said. "Let me be very precise about what I'm asking." I looked at Malen. "Are you telling me that in four years of sustained operational pressure, with the full resources of this network, we have been unable to neutralize one human woman who has no wolf, no magic, and no supernatural advantage of any kind."

"Yes," Malen said.

I turned back to the fire.

"The Ghost Hunt," I said.

"She won it the first time," Malen said. "Before the amnesia. After the amnesia — while she was operating without her memories, without the context of what she'd built and who she was — she came second." Malen paused on that. "She came second in the Ghost Hunt of Shadowmere Pack without knowing who she was. The trials are designed for wolves. She's human."

"Also a problem," Malen said, with the tone of someone who'd been saving this part.

"Tell me."

"Shadowmere's inner circle is — each member is, individually, at the top of their specific discipline," Malen said. "The security chief, Nina, built Shadowmere's alternative infrastructure during the curse years essentially from scratch. The communications and physical security systems she developed without the mindlink are more sophisticated than what most functioning packs use. Jordan, the intelligence operative, has a network that we didn't discover existed for three years — he'd embedded it in places we weren't looking, which means he was better at hiding things than we were at finding them, which is a specific kind of difficult." Malen paused. "Elite, the defense and war specialist, is someone we have actively avoided engaging directly since an incident in the second year that we don't discuss in briefings."

"What incident," I said.

"The incident we don't discuss in briefings," Malen said. "The point is that each of them, individually, is formidable. Together—" they stopped.

"Together what," I said.

"Together," Malen said carefully, "they appear to lose a significant portion of their individual cognitive capacity and replace it with something that is difficult to categorize."

I turned from the window.

"They're idiots together," Malen said. "Specifically and deliberately. They play poker in hidden rooms. They have book clubs. They bully the alpha. The alpha bullies them back. They make decisions about pack budget that include — based on the financial intelligence we've gathered — a not-insignificant expenditure on novels."

"Novels," I said.

"A specific series," Malen said. "Multiple members appear to have independently acquired copies and supplementary materials." A pause. "It seems to be a coping mechanism."

I stared at them.

"You're telling me," I said, "that the inner circle of the pack that has been the primary obstacle to our operations for four years — that has survived sixty-nine attempts on one of its members, that has maintained pack cohesion through a three-year alpha curse, that has killed two of my operatives this afternoon without apparent hesitation — spends their downtime reading novels together."