Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 641

Chapter 641

KILLIAN

The laughter in the car had been going for approximately twenty-five minutes and showed no signs of stopping.

Kael had lost the ability to produce sound somewhere around the fifteen-minute mark.

This was not metaphorical. He had been laughing — genuinely, fully, the kind of laughing that started in the chest and took over everything else — and at some point the laughing had exceeded the capacity of his respiratory system to keep up, and now he was simply shaking. His whole body. Shoulders, chest, the hand that kept coming up to cover his face and then sliding off because the hand was also shaking.

No sound.

Just the shaking.

Ivory was red.

Not the flush of someone who found something funny — the specific red of someone who had been laughed at for longer than they'd consented to and was running out of patience for the dignity of the situation. She was sitting beside me in the back seat and I could feel, through the very faint thread of the bond that the link restoration had made present, the specific quality of her emotional state, which was:

*I am going to stab him.*

Not actually. Probably. But the impulse was real and present and she was managing it with the specific tight management of someone who'd made a decision and was holding to it.

She hit him.

This was a mistake.

Not because hitting Kael was wrong — given everything — but because Kael's body, which had been shaking silently for several minutes, responded to being hit by producing a sound. A wheeze. Then a fresh wave of the laughing, louder than before, the specific quality of someone who'd been trying to wind down and had received new stimulus.

"STOP," Ivory said.

The sound Kael made was not stopping.

It was the opposite of stopping.

"KAEL," she said.

The shaking intensified.

"I am going to—" she started.

Nina said something from the front.

I didn't catch the full sentence because the moment Nina spoke, Kael — who had been at the peak of the laughing — produced a sound that I had never heard an Alpha produce before. It was not dignified. It was not the sound of someone who sent neighboring packs running from his territory in genuine fear. It was the sound of someone who had been pushed past the point of all management and was now purely, completely, helplessly caught in something they couldn't control.

His whole body was shaking.

No sound again.

Just the shaking.

Ivory hit him.

Not gently.

This sent him into another phase of the silent shaking.

"Kael," Ivory said, and her voice had arrived at the specific quality it got when she had decided that enough was enough and was implementing the decision. "Stop."

He could not stop.

The specific impossibility of being told to stop laughing when you were beyond the point where stopping was under conscious control — I'd been watching this for approximately four minutes and I was beginning to understand why Ivory was red.

"KAEL," she said.

His whole body shook.

"I will get the dagger," she said.

He made a sound. Not a word. The sound of someone trying to produce a word and having the laugh intercept it at the exit.

"He's going to die," Jordan said, with the specific tone of someone who was also laughing but was maintaining enough composure to provide commentary.

"He has not had air for five minutes," Elite said, from Jordan's other side.

"He's breathing," Jordan said.

"Not in a way that would satisfy a medical professional," Elite said.

"Ivory is a medical professional," Jordan said. "Ivory, is he breathing in a way that would satisfy you."

"Ivory wants him to stop breathing," I said.

Ivory hit him again.

Wrong approach.

The fresh wave of laughter from Kael produced no sound but produced enough physical response that the car moved slightly, Nina making a correction from the front with the automatic efficiency of someone who'd been dealing with this specific situation — Kael in the grip of helpless laughter — since they were teenagers.

"You are being ridiculous," Ivory said, to Kael.

Kael's mouth was open.

Still no sound.

Just the shaking and the tears that had been leaking from the corners of his eyes for approximately the past ten minutes because his body had been under the specific sustained assault of something genuinely funny for longer than it could manage without producing tears.

"I am going to run us off a cliff," Ivory said.

"That's the second time you've threatened that," Jordan said.

"I mean it more each time," she said.

"The first time was fairly emphatic," Jordan said.

"This one is more emphatic," she said.

Elite, in the corner of the back seat, was doing the contained version that was Elite laughing, which mostly manifested as a very slight change in the quality of their breathing and something happening in the corners of their eyes that wouldn't have been visible to someone who hadn't been watching.

I was watching.

Ivory hit Kael again.

This set him off.

This — the fact that hitting him set him off — was the thing that I was observing with the specific attention of someone who was still learning what this group looked like when they were fully themselves, when the crisis mode was off and the thing underneath it was running. Ivory knew that hitting him set him off. She hit him anyway. Because this was them, the specific dynamic of two people who'd known each other since before either of them had the language for what knowing someone actually meant, and hitting Kael when he was laughing too hard to breathe was the specific intimacy of knowing exactly what was going to happen and doing it anyway because the doing was the point.

"Kael," Jordan said, from his position beside me in the back, with the expression of someone making a genuine medical assessment, "I need you to breathe."

No response. Just shaking.

"He's going to die," Nina said, from the front.

"He's not going to die," Ivory said.

"He's been without breath for twenty five minutes," Nina said.

"He's been without breath for thirty minutes," Ivory said. "I've been timing it. He's fine."

"You've been timing it," Nina said.

"For safety," Ivory said.

"You've been timing how long Kael has been unable to breathe from laughing," Nina said. "For safety."

"Someone has to," Ivory said.

Kael made another sound. This one had more of a word in it. The word appeared to be something like *the pigs* but I couldn't confirm this because it arrived without enough breath behind it to be fully articulated.

"I KNOW ABOUT THE PIGS," Ivory said.

This was the wrong thing to say.

"IVORY," Jordan said, as Kael went into another phase.

"I KNOW THAT'S WHY I SAID IT WRONG," she said.

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