Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 600

Chapter 600

IVORY

The footsteps in the corridor were familiar.

Not Kael — I knew Kael's footsteps, had known them since we were teenagers, had learned the specific pattern of them through years of knowing where he was by sound alone. Not Nina's efficiency, not Jordan's measured pace, not Elite's absence of sound.

Killian.

He appeared in the doorway with the expression I'd been learning to read over the weeks of his presence in Shadowmere — the one that was different from the performing version, the one that was actually him, which was careful and present and had a specific weight in it that I was becoming more capable of seeing the longer he was here.

Ivy said: *Oh.*

*Don't,* I said.

*He's here,* she said.

*I can see that,* I said.

*His wolf is—*

*Ivy,* I said.

*Kain is very present,* she said. *I can feel him in the link from here.*

*Manage it,* I said.

*Easy for you to say,* she said.

It was not easy for me to say. But I said it anyway because the alternative was not managing it, and not managing it had consequences I'd already decided on.

Killian looked at me.

"You shut down the link," he said. "When you shifted."

"Yes," I said.

"I noticed," he said.

"I assumed you would," I said.

"Kain noticed," he said.

"Kain can manage," I said.

Killian looked at me with the specific expression of someone who had something to say and was deciding how to say it. He came into the lab — not presuming the desk, not taking the patient chair, standing in the middle of the space with the quality of someone who'd learned to occupy Ivory's spaces carefully, who understood that space in this lab was something granted rather than assumed.

I'd noticed that about him. The carefulness. The way he took up exactly as much space as was offered and not more.

"Kain wanted to meet Ivy," he said.

"Kain has met Ivy," I said. "Through the link. Several times. We've been in the same link since the restoration."

"Meet her properly," he said.

"I know what you mean," I said. "The answer is that Ivy and Kain meeting properly is not something that's going to happen today."

He was quiet.

"Or soon," I said.

"Ivory," he said.

"Killian," I said.

We looked at each other across the lab with the specific weight of everything we'd said and not said and were saying now without saying it.

Ivy said: *He looks like Kael.*

*I'm aware,* I said.

*From the side specifically,* she said. *The jaw.*

*They share a father,* I said.

"Without—"

"Killian," I said.

He looked at me.

"I told you not to hope," I said. "I told you to find someone else. I meant it. I'm not—" I stopped. "I'm not being cruel. I'm being accurate. Ivy and Kain meeting properly is the beginning of something that isn't going to have space to be what it should be. And I'd rather not start something that—"

I stopped.

He was very still.

"That what," he said.

"That I can't finish," I said.

It was more honest than I'd intended to be. The specific four-in-the-morning honesty that arrived when the management was thin and the actual thing slipped through the gap.

Killian heard it.

I watched him hear it — the specific quality of someone receiving a sentence and understanding that the sentence meant something other than what it appeared to mean on its surface. He was good at that. The intelligence background, the years of reading situations from the outside — he heard the layers in things.

"Can't finish," he said. "Not won't."

"Killian," I said.

"Those are different words," he said.

"They're not different in this context," I said.

"They're always different," he said. "Won't is a choice. Can't is a circumstance." He held my gaze. "You said can't."

"I misspoke," I said.

"You don't misspeak," he said.

He wasn't wrong. I was precise with language in the specific way of someone whose work required precision and who'd extended the habit into every other area. I didn't misspeak. I sometimes said things I hadn't intended to say, but the things I said were always the accurate ones.