Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 599

Chapter 599

IVORY

The afternoon had settled into the specific comfortable chaos of a pack rediscovering itself.

I could hear it from the lab — the link was not something you could turn off once it was active, not fully, not when two hundred and fourteen wolves were using it with the enthusiastic abandon of people who'd been without it for three years and had a great deal of accumulated things to say. The muted version I was maintaining for my own presence in the link was not the same as silence. It was more like holding a door partially closed while a very loud party continued on the other side.

The party was mostly wonderful.

Someone had broken another bench. I'd heard about this through the link in the specific way that bad news about your botanical work traveled when the link was active — not one person telling you but approximately forty people telling you simultaneously, all with slightly different details, creating a composite account that was comprehensive if somewhat inconsistent.

The bench had been stone. It was now in three pieces rather than two. The person responsible was unnamed in the link — a strategic omission that suggested pack loyalty to whoever had done it — but the descriptions of the specific cracking sound were vivid and unnecessary.

I added bench replacement to the list of things that needed addressing after everything else.

The list was long.

I was writing it down, because I was writing everything down, because that was what I did now in the quiet spaces when the specific urgency that had been driving me for three weeks was still present and the specific thing I was working toward was closer than it had been and every written-down thing was a thing that would exist after.

The four-year-old was the best part of the link today.

His name was Ben and he was four years old and he had absolutely no idea how to tune his thoughts out of the broadcast channel, and the pack had collectively decided to say nothing about this because what was happening was too extraordinary to interrupt.

Ben had wanted cookies.

This was his primary thought, his organizing principle, his current entire relationship with reality. He wanted the cookies that were on the kitchen counter in his family's quarters and his mother had said not before dinner and the specific injustice of this was being broadcast in real time to two hundred and fourteen wolves who were all very aware of the cookie situation and had opinions.

*The cookies,* Ben thought, in the link, at the volume of a child who had not yet learned that thoughts were private. *They are right there. She cannot see me from here. If I am very quiet—*

*Ben,* several people thought back, involuntarily, and then immediately tried to not think it because thinking it was the same as saying it and saying it would warn him and then the cookie situation would not resolve and everyone wanted it to resolve.

*She is in the other room,* Ben thought. *If I am very small—*

The link held approximately forty wolves in varying states of suppressed response. Someone — I suspected Edna — had the specific quality of someone who was enjoying this more than was strictly appropriate and was not helping.

*The cookies are chocolate,* Ben thought. *My favourite.*

The link made a sound that was the collective equivalent of forty adults trying not to react to a four-year-old's heist planning.

*I will take two,* Ben thought. *She will not notice two.*

*She will notice two,* approximately thirty wolves thought, and immediately tried to unthink it.

*She never notices two,* Ben thought. He had apparently convinced himself. The decision was being made in real time through the link. *I will be very fast. Like a wolf. I am a wolf now. Wolves are fast.*

*BEN,* his mother thought, from the other room.

A pause.

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