Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 593

Chapter 593

NINA

She was on him before the growl finished — not fighting in the combat sense, in the specific roughhousing sense that had its own rules and its own vocabulary and existed in the specific language of people who'd known each other since before they could articulate what knowing someone meant. She was fast, unreasonably fast for her size, the three years of not running having done nothing to whatever Ivory's specific physical quality was that kept outlasting everything thrown at it.

Kael was trying to get purchase and she wouldn't let him.

Jay was on his feet.

*Nina,* he said.

*I know,* I said.

*Should we—*

*Yes,* I said.

We moved.

From opposite sides, the way we'd moved in a thousand training exercises and half a dozen actual engagements, the coordinated flanking that Nina and Jay had built over years of working together until it was below conscious thought.

*On your left,* I said.

*I have the right,* Jay said.

Kael saw us coming.

*No,* he said. *Guys. Wait. Wait—*

We hit him from both sides.

The three of us — me and Jay and Ivy, who'd apparently had the same instinct simultaneously — piled onto an enormous Alpha wolf who was trying to maintain his dignity under the assault of three people who had very specific opinions about his dignity and where it ranked relative to the occasion.

It ranked low.

We rolled.

The pack cheered.

Someone — Jordan later said it was Edna, and I believe this entirely — started taking bets. The crowd that gathered was enthusiastic and had opinions and was placing them loudly.

Kael was fighting back, which was the specific Kael version of fighting back that understood the difference between winning and participating, because he could have sent all three of us off him in approximately four seconds and he wasn't doing that. He was playing. His wolf was playing. Khris, the enormous terrifying black wolf who neighboring packs feared and small pups fled from, was rolling in the grass with three friends and it was the most undignified he'd been in three years and it was the most present I'd seen him in three years and both of those things were the same thing.

Ivy was on his back.

*I have the high ground,* she said through the link.

*You have the high ground,* Jay confirmed, in the tone of a man doing sports commentary. *Khris is attempting the reversal—*

*Don't you dare,* I said, to Kael.

*Nia,* Khris said, *I'm going to—*

*Don't,* I said.

He reversed.

We went sideways.

We hit the edge of the incline at the bottom of the clearing's slight slope, the one I'd never given significant thought to as a topographical feature, and the momentum of a very large wolf and three smaller ones having a collective argument with gravity produced a predictable outcome.

We went into the pond.

All four of us.

The water was cold. Not unbearably — the morning had been warming the clearing for hours — but cold enough to be entirely felt, the specific full-body awareness of sudden immersion.

*My fur,* Khris said, from somewhere in the pond.

The tone of it.

*Kael,* Jay said, barely holding it together.

*My fur,* Khris said again. *This is—I'm an Alpha. This is not—I have a reputation. Ugh.*

I surfaced.

Ivy was already at the surface, shaking water off with the specific efficiency of a wolf who was not going to let being wet be anything other than a circumstance to be managed.

Jay surfaced beside me.

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