Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 568

Chapter 568

KAEL

My wolf had been narrating my exhaustion for the better part of an hour.

Not helpfully. Khris — the name had arrived sometime during the integration, the wolf deciding that if we were going to be one thing we might as well have a way to distinguish the commentary — had been providing a running account of every muscle that was tired, every hour since the last adequate sleep, every decision I'd made in the past week that had contributed to the current state of comprehensive physical depletion.

*The shoulders,* Khris said. *And the left knee. The left knee has opinions.*

*I know about the left knee,* I said.

*The left knee has had opinions since Tuesday,* Khris said. *You've been ignoring them.*

*I've been busy,* I said.

*Too busy for your own knee,* Khris said. *This is the life we've built.*

I pulled a clean shirt from the wardrobe and changed with the efficiency of someone who didn't have the bandwidth for anything that took longer than necessary. The quarters were quiet — Aria's things were on her side of the room in the specific organized arrangement she maintained, the small evidence of someone who'd learned to occupy space carefully, who'd arrived here with nothing and had been building a presence incrementally. Her jacket on the hook. Her boots by the door. The book on her nightstand that she'd been working through for two weeks, the bookmark about two-thirds in.

I grabbed my things for the den.

*The den floor is not better for the knee,* Khris said.

*The den floor is fine,* I said.

*You're twenty-four,* Khris said. *You sleep on floors like an old man and call it wolf preference.*

*It is wolf preference,* I said.

*It is avoidance,* Khris said. *The bed is fine. The bed is very good, actually. I remember the bed.*

*Khris,* I said.

*I'm just noting,* he said. *The bed exists and we have been choosing the floor for six months and it is a choice, not a preference.*

I was about to respond when the door opened.

Aria came in.

She stopped when she saw me. I stopped when I saw her — not because her presence was unexpected, she lived here, but because of the specific quality of her expression, which was the one she wore when she'd been working up to something and had arrived at the moment and was going to do it regardless of the timing.

"Kael," she said. "Could I talk to you for a moment?"

I looked at her. Looked at the bag in my hand. Looked at the hour.

"Is something wrong," I said. "Are you dying?"

She blinked.

"No," she said. "Why do you always ask that when I want to bring something up?"

"Because it sounds ominous," I said, "and I have a team that treats life and death as a jump rope. But — are the runes doing something they shouldn't? If you don't want to fight, we can change the plan—"

"I'm fighting," she said. "That's not—" She stopped. Looked at me with the directness that she'd been developing since the book club, the specific willingness to be clear that she hadn't had when she first arrived. "I want to talk about us."

I processed this.

"Us," I said. "As in — U, S. You and I. Feelings."

"Yes," she said.

*Oh,* Khris said.

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