Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 653

Chapter 653

ARIA

"Did she suffer," he said.

The healer was not processing the question fast enough for the situation. Too much had happened in too short a timeframe and the processing was behind the reality.

"Did. She. Suffer," Kael said.

"She — the wolfsbane—it would have been—" the healer stopped. "Quick," the healer said. "The wolfsbane in that concentration on a recently restored wolf. It would have been—it would have been fast."

Kael looked at the healer for a long moment.

Then he looked at the space where Ivory was supposed to be.

At the interrupted equipment.

At the specific clinical evidence of the thing that had happened here, the thing that had been happening when the alert had sounded and had been abandoned mid-interruption.

Something happened in his face.

Not the rage — the other thing. The thing that was underneath the rage, that the rage had been covering, that the rage had been doing the work of keeping covered because if it surfaced the covering was gone and what was underneath it was—

The mindlink erupted.

Not the warm collective presence of the pack's restored connection, the version that had been developing for days. This was the other version. The one that had been described in the curse's history, the thing that had made the inner circle shut down the link in the first year — the Alpha's wolf broadcasting at full capacity into the shared connection with the specific quality of something that wasn't curated or managed or filtered.

Pain.

Rage.

The specific version of both that existed when the wolf had made a determination and the determination was that there was nothing left to hold back for.

*She is dead,* Khris said, into the link, at a volume that was not a volume — it was a presence, a pressure, a thing that existed in the architecture of the connection itself rather than as a message transmitted through it. *She is dead. She is dead. She is dead.*

The chanting quality of it.

Nina's voice in the link — not words, the specific signal of someone who'd been hit by something and was going down.

Jordan somewhere, the pain audible in the link even without words.

Elite, who was always the most stable, broadcasting the specific signal of someone who was at the edge of what stability could manage.

*ARIA,* Silver said.

The link was—

I put everything I had into the moon child's connection to the pack architecture. Not the mindlink itself — the specific thing that was the Luna's relationship with the link, the thing that Silver and I had been building for weeks, the capacity to hold the architecture even under pressure.

I held it.

It was like holding a structure that had a fault line running through it and the fault line was active.

The link wanted to collapse. The pain being broadcast through it was the kind of pain that the link wasn't designed to carry — not the ordinary emotional weight of two hundred wolves connected, but this, the specific weight of an Alpha in the specific state of losing what he had built everything around and having no remaining reason for the management of what he was.

I held it.

Silver held it with me.

*The root,* Silver said. *Aria. Now.*

*The gap in the analysis,* I said.

*Doesn't matter,* Silver said. *Ivory said to take the root out. She made you promise. She told you this was the priority.*

*If the analysis was right—*

*Then we deal with that,* Silver said. *But right now Kael is in the specific state that is going to kill everyone in the link if we don't do something about the root that is amplifying it.*

I found Kael.

He was on the ground.

Not incapacitated — in the specific state of partial shift, the state that had been escalating since the communicator in the war room, the state that the root activation was feeding and the root was drawing power from the rage and the rage was feeding the root and the cycle was running and there was no exit from the cycle while the root existed.

He looked at me.

The look was not recognition.

Khris, at full deranged capacity, was looking out of Kael's face and the wolf did not see Aria.

The wolf saw an obstacle.

He moved.

The speed of it.

I got the moon shield up.

The impact hit the shield and the shield held and I was on my feet and then I wasn't on my feet and then the ground was where my back was and Kael was over me with his hand at my throat and the grip of someone who was not present in the way presence required for the grip to be anything other than what it was being.

I couldn't breathe.

Not dramatically. The specific clinical reality of a hand at the throat of someone who was also trying to use their powers while the person with the hand was an Alpha in full deranged mode who was currently impervious to the ordinary approaches.

*NOW,* Silver said.

I started the extraction.

The rune marks on my hands were already active — they'd been active since the estate gates, since the moon child sense had been running at capacity, and they went brighter when the extraction started, the specific luminescence of them that appeared when the lunar power was being used at a significant level.

The connection to the bond architecture.

I'd been feeling it for weeks, the specific thread that ran between me and Kael's wolf and the root that was embedded in it. Feeling it and studying it and building the language for the gap in Ivory's analysis.

The gap didn't matter right now.

Right now what mattered was that the root came out.

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