Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 573

Chapter 573

ARIA

I didn't make it to the end of the corridor before my vision blurred.

Not crying — I wasn't crying, I'd made a specific decision on the way out of the quarters that crying was not something I had the capacity for tonight, that the feeling was too large and too complicated for something as simple as tears. The blur was something else. The specific visual effect of moving too fast through a space when your body hadn't caught up to what your mind had just processed.

I rounded the corner near the secondary stairwell and walked directly into someone.

Hands caught me before I hit the floor — reflexive, the automatic response of someone with good instincts and a body that moved faster than thought. I registered the height first, then the grip, then the face when I looked up.

Killian.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

"Are you alright," he said.

"Fine," I said, which was so obviously untrue that saying it was almost funny. Almost.

He didn't release me immediately. Not holding on — just the pause of someone checking that the person they'd caught was actually stable before transferring weight back to them. When he was satisfied I wasn't going to list sideways, he stepped back.

"Where are you going," he said.

"Somewhere that isn't the quarters," I said.

He looked at the corridor I'd come from. Back at me.

"Do you want to walk," he said.

I thought about going back to the quarters. About Kael's face when he'd said it — *you told me to say it* — and the specific quality of the silence that had followed, the moment when he'd registered what he'd said and I'd seen him register it and it hadn't changed anything because the damage was already exactly what it was.

"Yes," I said.

We walked.

---

The pack grounds at this hour had the specific quiet of a place that was inhabited but not awake — the guards on rotation, the occasional light in a window, the sense of presence without the noise of it. We took the path that ran along the inner edge of the botanical perimeter, the one Ivory had planted with the nightbloom on the exterior edge so the luminescence was visible from the path without being overwhelming.

I'd been walking this path for weeks during the early morning channel work. It had become familiar in the way that places became familiar when you returned to them enough times that they stopped requiring attention. Tonight it required no attention, which was what I needed — something my feet could do without my head.

Killian walked beside me without talking.

"It's not even that I'm angry at him," I said, and this was the part that was the most difficult, the part I'd been trying to find words for since I'd left the quarters. "I understand how it works. I understand the history and the twelve years and what they built together and why it exists the way it does. I can't be angry at Ivory because she hasn't done anything wrong. I can't even be fully angry at Kael because he's not — he's trying. I can see him trying." I turned to face the path again. "But he loves her. And I'm his fated mate. And the specific unfairness of that is—"

"I know," Killian said.

The quality of those two words stopped me.

Not *I understand* or *I can imagine* — the specific weight of *I know* from someone who'd used it to mean the exact thing.

I turned to look at him.

"How," I said.

He was quiet for a moment. The specific quiet of someone deciding how much to say. His jaw did the thing it did when he was working through a calculation — whether the information was worth the cost of saying it, whether the person receiving it was someone he was willing to be that honest with.

He looked at the nightbloom.

"Ivory is my fated mate," he said.

The sentence arrived in the night air between us and stayed there.

I processed it.