Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 591

Chapter 591

NINA

We surrounded her from three sides.

Jay from the left, me from the right, and Kael — who I'd signaled through the link with the specific efficient shorthand we'd been using for years — from the front. Three wolves in a loose formation around one human woman with a notebook.

She looked up.

She looked at all three of us.

"No," she said.

Kael reached forward with his teeth and took the hem of her jacket.

He tugged.

"Khris," she said, with the tone she used for Kael's wolf specifically — the one that had twelve years of knowing in it, the one that was different from the way she addressed Kael the person because the wolf was different and she'd always understood the difference. "I said later."

Khris tugged again.

I sat on her feet.

"Nina," she said. "You are sitting on my feet."

I did not move.

"Get up," she said.

I looked up at her with the specific expression Nia had produced, which was the wolf version of the look I gave people who'd said something I'd already accounted for and wasn't moving from my position on.

"I need you to move," she said. "I have—"

Jay pushed the vial toward her with his nose.

The vial had been on the ground beside her — she'd picked it up when I'd handed it to her and then set it down and opened the notebook, and Jay had apparently noted its location and was now performing the specific Jordan move of addressing the core issue without surrounding it with verbal architecture.

Ivory looked at the vial.

She looked at Jay's nose.

She looked at me.

She looked at Kael, who was still holding her shirt with the specific gentle insistence of a wolf who was not going to let go until something changed.

"All of you," she said, "are using the wolf form as cover. You know I'd argue with you as people. You know I'd have seventeen clinical reasons and a procedural justification and you'd have to actually engage with the argument. As wolves you're just—" she gestured, "—vibes and noses and sitting on my feet."

*Yes,* I said, through the link, knowing she could hear it.

"Manipulative," she said.

*Also yes,* I said.

Something moved in her expression. Not the clinical register, not the management layer. The other thing — the one that was Ivory underneath all of it, the version that came out in the specific moments when the armor was at its thinnest.

She put her hand on Kael's head.

He went still.

"Later," she said, quietly.

The quality of the word was different from the earlier laters. Not argument. Something that was asking for the time.

I stayed on her feet.

Not as pressure — as presence. The specific I am here and I am not going anywhere that was Nia's most fundamental quality and had been my most fundamental quality for twenty eight years.

She looked at me.

Looked at Jay.

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