Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 635

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Chapter 635

ARIA

"It was the curse years," Nina said. "We needed hobbies that had applications."

"Kael bought BL novels," I said.

"Kael's hobby is significantly less practical than ours," Nina said.

The third bag was the armoury's general selection — wolfsbane in additional forms, smoke-based compounds that Ivory had developed, the specific defensive tools that Nina had been maintaining with the loving attention of someone who'd been told their purpose and had been waiting for that purpose to arrive.

Nina shouldered the third bag.

She did it with a quality that I understood — not the carrying of something heavy. The carrying of something that was finally going to be used for what it was made for.

Kael appeared.

He looked at the bags.

At the moon bullets case specifically.

"Nina," he said.

"Yes," she said.

"The moon bullets," he said.

"Yes," she said.

"We're bringing all of them," he said.

"We're bringing the case," she said.

He looked at her.

She looked back.

"Good," he said.

---

Kael's private car had been in the secondary garage since the first year of the curse.

I hadn't known it existed. Not the fact of it specifically — I knew Kael had vehicles, the pack had vehicles for various functions — but this car was different from the pack's utility fleet, and the difference was visible immediately when Kael opened the garage door.

It was personal.

The specific quality of something that belonged to a person rather than a function — not new, not a statement of status, a car that had been used for things that mattered and had accumulated the evidence of those things over years. Dark, well-made, the kind of vehicle that a young Alpha in his early twenties would have chosen when he was just beginning to understand what he wanted from things.

Nina stopped when she saw it.

She stopped completely, both bags in her hands, and looked at the car with the expression she had when something arrived from the past and required a moment before she could move through it.

"I can't believe we get to use this again," she said.

Her voice had a quality that wasn't Nina's usual register.

Jordan stopped beside her.

They looked at the car.

"She said she'd burn it," Jordan said.

"She said she'd burn it if she failed to save him," Nina said.

"The first year," Jordan said.

"End of the first year," Nina said. "She put it in here and she said she wasn't letting anyone use it again and if she failed—" she stopped.

"She didn't burn it," Jordan said.

"No," Nina said. "She didn't."

"She kept it," he said.

"She kept it," Nina said.

I looked at the car and thought about Ivory putting it in this garage in the first year of the curse, making that decision, and the car sitting here untouched for three years and then another nine months while the curse broke and the aftermath accumulated and the pack rebuilt.

Waiting.

Ivory looked at the car with the expression that was very controlled and was controlling something specific.

"Get in," she said. "We're going."

---

The inside of the car was — something else.

There was a passenger seat with a name tag. I saw it when Nina got in and moved something — a small laminated tag on the back of the seat that said *Ivory* in the handwriting of someone who'd been approximately eighteen when they wrote it. The writing had the quality of something done definitively, with ownership and humor simultaneously.

Jordan saw it and made a sound.

"She called shotgun permanently," he said.

"She called permanent shotgun in 2015," Nina said. "It has been honored."

"Not since the curse years," Jordan said.

"It was honored in absentia," Nina said.

"I never got shotgun," Jordan said.

"No," Nina said.

"In fifteen years," Jordan said.

"No," Nina said.

"That's—" he started.

"Jordan," Ivory said. "Get in the car."

He got in the car.

The cassette was still in the player.

Kael saw it first — the specific recognition of something he'd put there years ago, the small object that had been sitting in this car since before the curse and had been waiting in the dark of the garage.