Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 606

Chapter 606

ARIA

"I was hoping you'd stop thinking about it," back-right Marcus said.

"I never stopped thinking about it," Kael said.

"I can see that now," back-right Marcus said.

"You said it wasn't you," Kael said.

"I know," the back-right Marcus said.

"At the autumn gathering, you were standing right there, and you said—"

"I know what I said," the Marcus said.

"Why," Kael said.

The Marcus looked at him with the expression of someone doing an honest accounting.

"You were ten," he said. "I was twelve. You called my wolf slow."

A pause.

"My wolf," the driver Marcus said, "is not slow."

"I was ten," Kael said.

"Well it wasn't any better," the driver Marcus said.

"That doesn't—" Kael started.

"And you called him slow in front of everyone in the eastern training yard," the Marcus said. "In front of the whole cohort. And he was not slow. He was learning."

Kael was quiet.

"He's not slow now," Kael said.

"No," the Marcus said. "he's not."

"You could have told me it was you," Kael said.

"You could have apologized for calling him slow," the Marcus said.

A specific kind of silence.

Ivory, who had been managing her not-composure with significant effort since approximately Marcus number five, made a sound.

It escaped.

Small, quickly muffled, but present — the specific escaped sound of someone who'd been holding something and had lost hold of it at the precise wrong moment.

She looked at the ceiling.

Kael looked at her.

"Don't," he said.

"I didn't say anything," she said.

"You made a sound," he said.

"The sound was involuntary," she said.

"It was a specific kind of involuntary," he said.

"I can't control my involuntary sounds," she said.

"You've been controlling them for twenty minutes," he said.

"I've been trying," she said. "I've been trying very hard. But he said his wolf was learning—"

"Ivory," Kael said.

"And he was," Ivory said. "He was learning, and you—" she stopped. "You were ten."

"Yes," Kael said. "I was ten."

"Children say things," Ivory said.

"Yes," Kael said.

"And sometimes the things get punched," Ivory said.

"IVORY," Kael said.

She looked at the ceiling again.

Elite, in the corner of the room, had not broken.

Elite had been watching the entire sequence of events that happened in the past twenty minutes and she had not broken.

Elite broke when the younger child — the four-year-old, the one being held by the older child's hand — looked at the driver Marcus and said, with the complete sincerity of a small person asking a genuine question:

"Did it hurt? When you punched him?"

"Yes," the Marcus said, looking at his hand with the distant expression of memory. "My hand, not—"

"Did it hurt him?" the child clarified.

"Also yes," the driver Marcus said.

"Good," the child said, with the specific satisfaction of someone who'd received complete information.

Elite made a sound.

The room stopped.

Everyone looked at Elite.

Elite, who had not made an uncontrolled sound in any professional context in the entire time I'd been at Shadowmere — Elite, who had composed through things that had broken everyone else, who had maintained professional register through the border battle and the elder council crisis and the book club and the pond — was laughing.

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