Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 578

Chapter 578

IVORY

The question arrived the way it arrived sometimes at four in the morning when the suppression layers were thinner. Not the useful question — not *what needs to be done* or *what is the next step* — the other one. The one that didn't have a practical answer.

I wanted Kael.

I wanted the specific Kael of three years before the curse, the one who'd been learning to be an Alpha and had been doing it imperfectly and with the specific stubborn determination of someone who'd decided that imperfect was not the same as inadequate. The one who'd argued with me about botanical budgets and then come around when I demonstrated the results. The one who'd known my sleeping schedule and my tea preferences and the specific way I needed an argument to be structured before I could hear it, and had learned all of those things through the years of knowing me.

I wanted to sleep with him. Not as a metaphor — literally, the physical thing, the warmth of it, the specific safety of being in a space with someone who knew where all your injuries were and accounted for them. I'd spent four years not sleeping well, the specific sleep of someone who'd learned to be always slightly alert, and I wanted — just once more — to sleep in the way I'd slept before the curse. Without the alertness. Without the part of my brain that was always running the perimeter check.

I couldn't have it.

I couldn't have it because Aria existed and Aria had the bond and Aria was building something with Kael that was real and growing and she'd already had nine months of him sleeping in the den and not touching her and I knew what it felt like to want someone who was oriented somewhere else.

I wasn't going to do that to her.

I'd given him up. I'd meant it. I'd mean it right until the end, which was coming faster than any of them knew.

But at four in the morning with the shaking hands, I was allowed to want it.

Just for a few minutes.

Just in the dark.

---

I wiped my eyes at five-thirty when I heard footsteps in the corridor.

Not Kael — I knew his footfall by sound, the specific pattern of someone who moved with the deliberate weight of a person who'd learned to control exactly how much space he took up. These were different. Lighter. The specific cadence I'd been learning over the past weeks in the clinic, when the recovery room had been occupied and I'd been in and out of it enough times to start filing the pattern.

Killian.

He appeared in the clinic doorway with the expression of someone who'd been awake for a while and had decided to go somewhere rather than continue not sleeping in the recovery room.

He looked at me. At the desk covered in notes. At the pen in my hand and the pages spread out in every direction.

"You've been here all night," he said.

"I work at night," I said.

"You work constantly," he said. "The night is just when you do it without anyone watching."

He wasn't wrong. I didn't respond.

He came into the clinic and sat in the patient chair — the one across from the desk, the one Kael had been sitting in, I realized, sometime in the past few hours, though I'd been too focused on the notes to fully register when he'd come and gone. The chair still had the specific impression of having been recently occupied.

"Is it," he said.

"Yes," I said. "Killian—"

"I want to know if there's a chance," he said. "That's all. I'm not asking for a declaration. I'm not asking you to stop loving Kael. I just—" he paused. "Is there any possibility. Any version of things where there's a chance."

I put the pen down.

Looked at him directly, which I'd been avoiding doing since he sat down because looking at Killian directly required me to see what was actually there, and what was actually there was something I'd been managing around for weeks.

"No," I said.

He absorbed this.

"Don't," I said, when his expression started organizing toward a response. "Don't try to talk me into a different answer. The answer is no. You should find someone else to direct this toward. Someone who can actually—" I stopped. "The bond is the bond. That's biological. What you feel because of it isn't necessarily what you'd feel in the absence of it. You should find someone to love who isn't—"

"I've loved you since we were children," he said.

I looked at him.

"Not because of the bond," he said. "The bond isn't why. The bond confirmed something that was already there." He held my gaze with the steady unflinching quality of someone who'd decided they were seeing this through. "I was twelve years old at a winter gathering. You were arguing with the then-Beta about the botanical budget allocation and you were eleven and you were winning." He paused. "I thought you were the most remarkable thing I'd ever seen."

I didn't say anything.