Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 579

Chapter 579

IVORY

"I've thought that every time I've seen you since," he said. "During the curse years, from a distance — the reports of what Ivory was doing, the sixty-nine incidents, the death eater. I thought—" he stopped. "I thought you were remarkable and i was envious, because you went through all this to save Kael and i was on the bad guy side, because i was too hurt to accept that Kael exiling me wasn't kael's fault, i deserved it.And then I came here and you were the same person who'd been arguing about botanical budgets at eleven and winning every argument you'd decided to have since."

"Killian," I said.

"I know you love him," he said. "I'm not asking you to stop. I know what I'm working with. I'm asking if there's space, in any version of things, for something that isn't competing with that. Not replacing it. Just — existing alongside it."

"There isn't," I said.

"Why," he said.

Because I'm going to be dead before you'd have the chance to find out, I didn't say.

"Because it wouldn't be fair to you," I said instead. "You deserve someone who can actually—"

He stood up.

I tracked the movement with the part of my attention that never stopped running the room, and I was already formulating the response before I'd finished the assessment — he was too close, he was going to—

He kissed me.

Not tentative. The kind that happened when one decided and was following through with the specific completeness of someone who'd run out of patience for half-measures.

I froze.

The freeze was not a response I'd planned. I'd planned a response and in the specific three seconds of the freeze I registered several things simultaneously.

His hands were on my waist. Not holding — supporting, the distinction was real, the difference between being gripped and being steadied. His hands knew where the injuries were, or at least where the recent ones were, because the grip was careful in the places that needed careful.

He'd been paying attention.

And then the other thing.

The warmth.

It started at the specific point of contact — his hands, his mouth — and radiated outward with the quality of something that had been waiting for activation, a compound that needed a catalyst to express itself.

The bond.

I felt the bond.

Not the full version — not the specific overwhelming thing I'd been told about by wolves who'd found their fated mates, the all-consuming recognition. A fragment of it, a trace, the specific evidence that the infrastructure was there even when the signal was suppressed. Like feeling a pulse in a vein you'd thought was dead.

I pushed him off.

Hard. Both hands on his chest, the full force of someone who'd been practicing exactly this kind of rapid displacement since the first year of the curse. He went back — not falling, catching himself against the supply shelf, but back.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

My hands were shaking in a completely different way from how they'd been shaking at four in the morning. This was not grief-shaking. This was the specific physical response to having felt something I wasn't supposed to feel, couldn't afford to feel, had been operating for weeks on the premise that I couldn't feel.

"Ivory," he said.

"Don't," I said.

"You felt it," he said.

"I don't know what you think I—"

"You felt it," he said again, steadier. "I felt you feel it. The bond works both directions. When you felt it, I felt you feel it."

I looked at the wall.

"That doesn't change anything," I said.

"It changes—" he started.

"It doesn't change anything," I said, and my voice came out harder than I intended, the specific edge that arrived when something threatened the specific careful architecture I'd been building. "I can feel the bond. That's biological. That's the infrastructure. It doesn't change what I—" I stopped.

"What you feel," he said.

"What the plan is," I said.

He looked at me.

"What plan," he said.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify