Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 595

Chapter 595

ARIA

I recognized them.

Theo was twenty-one, dark-haired, one of the pack members who'd been part of the thirty-wolf channel group. Luca was nineteen, lighter coloring, who I knew from Priya's training cohort. Both of them had the specific quality of people who'd been carrying something for a significant amount of time and had just discovered that the mindlink had made the carrying visible and were not pleased about this.

"—you came to the training sessions specifically because I was there—" Theo said.

"—I came to the training sessions because ELITE runs them—" Luca said.

"—you asked me to partner with you—"

"—I asked everyone to partner with me—"

"—you asked me first—"

"—ALPHABETICALLY—"

"—my name starts with T—"

This produced a silence in which Luca visibly processed the alphabetical issue and arrived at the conclusion that this particular argument was not going to help him.

"The point," Luca said, in a slightly different register, "is that I was not — the girl at the market, I've been talking to her for months and you knew—"

"—I didn't know—"

"—you absolutely knew—"

"—I found out the same time you—"

"—you could have said—"

"—there was nothing to say because I didn't—" Theo stopped.

Both of them stopped.

The link went very quiet in the space around them. Not the whole link — the whole link was still actively chaotic with bench situations and smell discoveries and strength calibration issues. But the specific corner of the link that touched these two had gone quiet with the quality of something that was about to become clear.

"Oh," Theo said.

He said it at the same time Luca said it.

They looked at each other.

The link, between the two of them, was doing something that I could feel from where I was standing — the specific warmth of a fated bond recognition, the architecture clicking into place, the thing that the link's restoration had made newly visible.

They'd been too suppressed before to feel it. The bond had been there and the suppression had been on it and the girl at the market had been the thing they'd both been reaching toward because the thing they were actually supposed to be reaching toward had been inaccessible.

Now it wasn't.

The recognition arrived in both of them simultaneously and their expressions went through the specific journey of people receiving information they had not been expecting and had significant feelings about and were not in a private location.

The crowd around them was — also receiving this information, because the link made a great deal of things visible that had previously been private, and the crowd's response was the specific response of people watching something they'd recognized and had opinions about.

Nina appeared beside me.

Then Jordan.

Then Ivory, who'd made it back to the main grounds from wherever she'd been and was standing at the edge of the crowd with the specific attentiveness of a healer and researcher encountering a situation of professional interest.

Kael moved through the crowd.

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