Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 619

Chapter 619

ARIA

"What are you going to tell him," he said.

"That I've been feeling something through the bond about the root and I want to examine it more closely before the removal," I said. "Which is true."

"That's not the full truth," he said.

"No," I said. "It's not. But it's true." I held his gaze. "If Silver is right — if there's an alternative pathway — then Ivory lives and Kael doesn't have to make an impossible choice and the Convention case has a different shape because the person Cassium is trying to execute is still alive." I paused. "If Silver is wrong—"

"We know the analysis is complete," he said.

"And we figure out together how to address that," I said.

He was quiet.

"She trusted me with the pages," he said. "She gave them to me because she wanted someone to check the work. That's what I'm doing." He looked at me. "But if you find something and I help you find it, and Ivory finds out we went around her—"

"We didn't go around her," I said. "She asked for the work to be checked. She said *I could be wrong.* That's permission to check."

"She might not see it that way," he said.

"She might not," I said. "But Ivory dying because we were too careful about her feelings is not an outcome I can accept."

He looked at the file.

At the pages Ivory had given him with the specific careful gesture of someone who'd been holding something alone and had finally handed a piece of it to someone else.

"What do you need from me," he said.

"Hold what you know," I said. "Don't tell Jordan yet. Don't tell Nina. Give me two days to examine the root architecture and determine if Silver's instinct has merit." I looked at him. "If it does, we go to Ivory first. We show her the gap in the analysis. We give her the chance to see it herself before anyone else knows."

"And if she won't look," he said.

"She'll look," I said. "She gave you the pages. She said she could be wrong. Whatever she's decided about the outcome, some part of her wants to be wrong." I paused. "That part is what we're working with."

He was quiet for a long moment.

Then he held out the file.

"Read it," he said. "All of it. Understand the analysis the way she built it. Then examine the root with Silver and tell me if what she built has a gap."

I took the file.

It was not heavy. The pages were thin, compact, the specific density of four years of research compressed into the space that research compressed into when the person doing it was Ivory. Every line precise. Every notation deliberate. The margins annotated in the specific Ivory shorthand that I'd been learning from the BL novel annotations and the compound notes and everything else she'd written in the spaces of things.

Silver said: *Read it carefully.*

*I will,* I said.

*Feel what she felt when she wrote it,* Silver said. *The places where she was certain and the places where she was hoping. They're different. You'll be able to tell the difference.*

*How,* I said.

*Because you know her,* Silver said. *Nine months. You know how she reads.*

I looked at the first page.

The specific Ivory handwriting — steadier than it should have been, given what she'd been writing. The clinical register in written form, the same layer that existed in everything she produced, the management visible even in the way she formed letters.

And underneath it, in the specific places where the analysis rested its weight, something that Silver was right about.

I could tell the difference.

The certain places. The places where four years of research had produced conclusions that were solid and founded and rested on evidence that didn't wobble.

And the other places. The places where the conclusion was present but the foundation was — not weak, exactly. Assumed. The places where Ivory had arrived at an outcome and had not asked whether a different outcome was possible because the asking would have required hoping, and Ivory had decided not to hope.

She'd stopped hoping somewhere in the second year.

I could feel the place in the analysis where the hoping had stopped.

And in the stopping, she'd missed something.

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