Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 572

Chapter 572

KAEL

She looked at the window. The same window Killian had been looking out of in the secondary clinic, weeks ago. The same eastern garden.

"No," she said. "It isn't."

"I need to tell you something," I said.

She waited.

"I said I chose Aria," I said. "At the book club. I meant it — I mean it. The bond is real. What I feel for her is — it's growing. It's not what you and I have, it's different from that, but it's real and it's becoming something and I'm not walking away from it." I held her gaze. "But I've been carrying the old future. The one we had before the curse. The names we'd chosen, the things we'd planned — I've been holding onto it in the way you hold onto something you haven't finished grieving."

Ivory was very still.

"I haven't grieved it," I said. "The future we lost. I've been trying to build the new one without finishing with the old one. And that's—" I stopped. "That's not fair to Aria. And it's not fair to you. And it's not fair to whatever we actually are now."

"What are we now," she said. Her voice was very quiet.

"I don't know," I said. "That's honest. I know I love you. I know that hasn't gone anywhere and I don't think it's going to go anywhere and I'm not pretending it isn't what it is." I looked at my hands. "And I know I chose Aria. And I know those two things have to exist simultaneously because the alternative is being dishonest about one of them."

"Kael," she said.

"I need to put the old future down," I said. "Properly. Not pretend it away. Not manage around it. Actually put it down." I looked at her. "And I think to do that I needed to say it out loud to you. Because you were the other person in it."

She was quiet for a long time.

"The children's names," she said, eventually.

"Yes," I said.

Something moved in her expression. The managed layer and the clinical layer and everything underneath them.

"I still think about the garden," she said. "The one I was going to build on the eastern side of the quarters. Different from the clinic garden." She paused. "More personal. For us, specifically."

"I know," I said. "You showed me the plans."

"Before the curse," she said.

"Before the curse," I said.

We sat with that for a moment. The specific weight of all the things that had been planned before the curse and had not survived it.

"I'm going to break the root," she said.

The shift in her voice told me something. Not what — I didn't have the specific information yet — but the quality of the shift, the way she said it with the settled certainty of someone who'd arrived at a decision they were completely at peace with.

"I know," I said. "That's the plan."

"Yes," she said. "It is."

Something in the way she said it.

*Khris,* I said.

*I feel it too,* Khris said. *I don't know what it is.*

"Ivory," I said.

"You should go," she said. "You need sleep. The left knee needs sleep."

"How do you know about the left knee," I said.

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