Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 561

Chapter 561

HALE

"Yes," Malen said.

"And losing brain cells," I said.

"That's their characterization," Malen said. "They know they do it. It seems to be intentional. The specific combination of being the best at what they do individually and collectively choosing to spend their personal time being entirely ridiculous appears to be — a feature rather than a failure."

I sat down.

"What about Kael?"

"Is not someone I want to underestimate," Malen said. "Which I know is the position we started from — we commissioned the curse specifically because he was going to be the kind of Alpha that couldn't be managed through standard means. The curse was supposed to limit his operational capacity." He paused. "It didn't. It complicated it. But the three years of the curse produced a pack that could operate without the mindlink, without standard wolf infrastructure, under sustained pressure, with improvised solutions. They're better now than they were before. The curse made them better."

The room absorbed this.

"Give me a deranged alpha and I have a ten percent chance of winning," Malen said. The phrasing was deliberate — he was choosing the most honest version of it, not the diplomatic one. "With the right resources, the right positioning, the right moment. Ten percent. Against Kael, right now, in his territory? Ten percent." He looked at the table. "But she—"

He stopped.

I waited.

"She is insane," he said, and for the first time in the briefing his voice had something in it that wasn't the operational flat. Something that was, if I was reading it correctly, close to a very specific kind of respect that people developed for things they'd spent years trying to overcome and hadn't.

"She has been going toe to toe with our kind for four years and she keeps surviving. Not because we underestimated her — we stopped underestimating her after the third operation. Not because of luck — we've put her in positions where luck wasn't enough and she found something other than luck to run on." He looked at me.

"She removed a death eater from her own body with a blade and her hands and apparently decided it wasn't going to kill her and it didn't. She has plants that attack people. Not figuratively. The plants move. They've taken down trained operatives. She built a bunker that would kill the moon child she'd been searching for years to find. She reads BL novels in the same building as an Alpha who would level half the northeastern territory if she asked him to." He paused.

"I'm not saying we can't deal with this. I'm saying it's not as simple as the framing suggests, and I think you need to understand that before we proceed."

Serath was looking at Malen with an expression I couldn't fully read.

Petra was writing something down that was probably not going to survive her edit process.

The rest of the table had the collective quality of people who'd known most of what Malen had just said and had been waiting for someone to say it where leadership could hear it.

"The moon child," I said.

"Aria," Malen said.

"She's connected the thirty wolves," I said. "The bond anchor — our asset confirmed the channel exists. Thirty wolves with a permanent connection running through the Luna."

"Yes," Malen said.

"How much more," I said.

Malen was quiet for a moment.

"I think," he said, "that they may know about the Thornfield cell."

The room went the specific quiet of a room that had received very bad news.

"How," Serath said.

"The financial records Jordan found connecting the original curse commission to the Blackwood pack treasury," Malen said. "Our asset confirmed he has them. Those records trace back through two intermediary accounts. The second intermediary account—" he stopped. "Has a connection to Thornfield that a skilled intelligence operative, given enough time, would find."

"Jordan is a skilled intelligence operative," I said.

"Jordan ," Malen said, "is better than anyone I've trained in this network. And I say that having trained people for fifteen years."

The fire burned.

I sat in front of it and thought about the network — about the three generations it had taken to build the Ashveil coven to where it was, about the operations that had succeeded and the ones that hadn't, about the specific patience of playing a long game and watching the long game pay out.

And I thought about a woman who'd declared war from a dungeon after removing a death eater from an implanted operative and killing two members of my senior network with a dagger that turned people to ash.