Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 613

Chapter 613

ARIA

I know," I said.

"It's taking longer than it should," he said.

"I know," I said.

"That's not fair to you," he said.

"I know that too," I said. "And I'm still not walking away from it."

He looked at me with the expression that I'd been learning for nine months — the one that existed when all the layers were down, the one that was just him. It had the complexity of everything that had happened and the honesty he'd been working toward and something else underneath both of those that I was getting better at naming.

He was starting to want this.

Not the bond. Not the responsibility. The actual thing — me, specifically, in the specific way that the book club's window was different from the door, the way choosing was different from settling.

It was early. The beginning of it, the way things were at their beginning — present but not yet fully formed, recognizable but not yet solid. But it was there.

Silver felt it too.

*He's getting there,* she said.

*I know,* I said.

*Khris is close,* she said.

*I know,* I said.

*This morning in the woods,* she said. *When he told me why he didn't run with the team. When he said he wanted to chase her and roughhouse her and talk to Ivy. He was honest about it.*

*Yes,* I said.

*That's the beginning of honest,* Silver said. *He couldn't have said that three months ago.*

*No,* I said. *He couldn't.*

*And he's saying it to you now,* she said. *That's different from before.*

*It's different,* I said.

"The Convention letter," I said, to Kael. "Cassium's claim. What happens to me if Jordan's plan doesn't work."

"It works," he said.

"If it doesn't," I said.

"Then I contest it," he said. "Formally, at the Council level. An Alpha can contest a prior claim on his bonded mate under the same Convention — it goes to formal proceedings and I make the case for why the bonding was legitimate."

"Can you win that case," I said.

"Jordan and Ivory built the case," he said. "I'll make it."

"What's the case," I said.

"That you came to Shadowmere as a legitimate mate candidate," he said. "That the bond formed naturally — which it did, the bond is a fated bond, the arrangement brought you here but the bond itself is real, you can't manufacture fated bonds. That Ivory's methods were irregular but the outcome was legitimate." He paused. "And that Cassium's prior claim is invalid because there was no prior claim — there was an interest, at most, which doesn't constitute claim under the Convention's own definition."

"And Ivory," I said.

He was quiet.

"The file Jordan has," he said. "If it does what Jordan thinks it does—"

"And if it doesn't," I said.

"Then we find something else," he said.

"Kael," I said.

"We find something else," he said again, and his voice had the specific quality of someone who'd arrived at the bottom of a position and was standing on it.

I looked at him.

At the Alpha who'd banned fated bonds because of what they'd cost his family and had ended up in one and was working through what that meant. At the man who'd sat on the floor under the sealed wall and said things he hadn't managed. At the wolf who'd bowed his head to a seven-year-old because sometimes the smallest win was the most important one.

"Kael," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"I have something to tell you," I said.

He waited.

"About Ivory," I said.

Something moved in his expression.

"What about Ivory," he said.

I thought about the forty pages of notes. The recalibration sequence written twice. The muted thread in the link when she shifted. The specific peace of someone who'd decided. Killian with the research, reading the map, the only person she'd told.

I thought about what Silver had been saying for weeks.

Not the version from the book where everything resolved cleanly at chapter twenty-two and the window was behind you and the door was forgotten.

The real version. The one where the window had been gone through and the door was still visible and both things existed simultaneously and the choosing was something you did every day rather than once.

I was choosing.

Every day.

Starting now.

*Good,* Silver said.

Outside the meeting room window, the eastern garden was luminescent in the afternoon light, the nightbloom doing what Ivory had built it to do — beautiful at every hour, present at every hour, built to outlast the hands that had made it.

I looked at it.

Then I looked at Kael.

"Tell me about the children's names," I said.

He blinked.

"The ten names," I said. "Jordan said ten names for ten children. Tell me."

He looked at me.

"Why," he said.

"Because you've been carrying the old future," I said. "And I've been fighting a ghost I couldn't see clearly. And I want to know what the ghost actually looks like." I held his gaze. "Tell me. Then we can put it down together."

He was quiet for a long time.

Then, slowly, he told me. And I listened.

And in the telling and the listening, something shifted between us — not the bond, not the formal thing, something smaller and more real than either.

The beginning of actually knowing each other.

Not the managed versions. The actual ones.

Outside, the nightbloom was luminescent and the pack was alive in the link and the countdown was still running somewhere I couldn't fully see yet.

But I was here. In this room. With him. Choosing.

A/n: Aria ehn, such a masochist, they gave you chance to run, you say no. Wel dear readers, this is why nobody told Aria about what she was initially brought for. I have been hinting at it, for chapters since Sera waved that copy but nooooo. Ivory was a b****.