Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 648

Chapter 648

ARIA

Two of Solander's wolves had her by the arms and she was making the experience of holding her extremely unpleasant for both of them — not because she was winning, she was significantly smaller than both of them and the physical math was not in her favor, but because she was using everything she had with the specific focused efficiency of someone who'd been in situations where everything she had was what she had and had learned to use it completely.

Clara.

The girl Ivory had described. The one with the moon dagger at her ribs within forty-five seconds of introduction. The one who'd thrown a chair through a reinforced window.

She was — small. The first thing that registered was the specific smallness of her in the context of the grip of the two wolves, and then everything else. Dark hair, dark eyes, the specific quality of a face that had been watching things for long enough that the watching had become visible in the expression. Old eyes in a young face, the specific combination of someone who'd had to be older than they were for longer than they should have been.

She was bleeding from somewhere — the window, probably, or the capture, one of the two.

She was still fighting.

"Get your—" she started, and the rest of the sentence was the specific vocabulary of someone who'd been in Old Haven since they were old enough to be there and had no concept of adjusting their language for audience.

"Enough," Kael said.

She looked at him.

The fighting paused.

Not because the word had stopped her — because the specific quality of the word had registered. The Alpha register. The one that operated below the verbal, that reached the wolf instinct even in someone whose wolf instinct had been operating in the worst possible conditions for their entire life.

She looked at Kael.

He looked at her.

Then he crossed the room.

The fury that had been in him since Ivory had rolled out of the car — contained, controlled, channeled into the operational requirements of getting to the safe house and getting through the door and getting to this room — was still there. Under the control. Present and real and looking for something to direct itself at.

Clara was fifteen.

Clara was also the daughter of the man who'd taken Ivory.

Kael slammed her into the wall.

Not the managed version — the full force of an Alpha who had been holding something for hours and had made a decision about where it was going, the wall cracking behind her on the impact, the specific violence of someone who'd stopped calculating the appropriate response.

She made a sound.

Then she was bleeding more, from the wall, and Kael had her by the front of her jacket and his face was the specific face that had made the name Kael the Deranged something that neighboring packs used to keep children from doing dangerous things.

"Kael," I said.

He didn't look at me.

"I don't give a fuck," he said, to Clara, "what your priorities are. What you do or don't want to say. What agreements you think you have or don't have. Your father and Hale took my healer." His voice was at the level below shouting that was more dangerous than shouting. "They took Ivory. And I am running out of patience for diplomacy and I have been running at a deficit of sleep and I am currently held together by a wolf integration and a compound that Ivory made for me because Ivory makes everything for me and Ivory is not here right now because your father and Hale took her."

He leaned in.

"The next words out of your mouth," he said, "are the locations, the coordinates, the plans, and where the document to your specific miserable life is being held. Or I will set aside the fact that you are fifteen and do something about my current mood that will be irreversible. You think Ivory is terrifying — and Ivory is terrifying, she is objectively the most terrifying human being I have ever encountered — try a deranged Alpha who has significantly less patience for appealing to someone's moral side."

Clara's eyes were on him.

Not scared — or not only scared. The specific assessment of someone who was cataloguing information in real time, who'd received a threat and was processing it against the full picture of who was making it.

"You can't—" she started.

"Really," Kael said.

He reached for the claws.

The partial shift coming through in the specific way it came through when the integration was active and being directed rather than running loose — controlled, aimed, the specific thing that made an Alpha with full wolf integration categorically different from a suppressed wolf.

The claws extended.

Clara screamed.

Not the defensive scream of someone who'd decided on a tactic. The genuine one, the one that arrived when the body received information about immediate threat that the mind hadn't yet processed.

"I'll talk," she said. "I'll talk. Stop — I'll talk."

Nina, from somewhere to my right, said: "Damn it. I wanted to be the one to do it."

Jordan looked at her.

"Nina," he said.

"I've been waiting since we got in the car," she said. "I had a whole approach."

"Your approach was going to work," Jordan said.

"It was going to work very well," Nina said. "And now we've gone the Kael route."

"It's effective," Jordan said.

"It's effective," Nina said. "It's also less elegant."

"Nina," Jordan said.

"It worked," Nina said. "I know it worked. I'm allowed to have opinions about the methodology."

I looked at Clara.

At the blood and the wall damage and the specific state of a fifteen-year-old who'd just been slammed into a wall by an Alpha King and had claws extended at her and was now talking.

"Kael," I said.

"Aria," he said.

"She's a child," I said.

"We've all been through worse as kids," he said, still looking at Clara. "That's not the bar you think it is."

"Kael—"

"She's going to talk," he said. "And then she's going to give us what we need. And then—" he looked at me briefly, something in his expression that was the full complicated thing, the Alpha and the furious and the person underneath both, "—and then you can have your arc."

I looked at Clara.

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