Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 656

Chapter 656

ARIA

The bond architecture — the actual structure of it, the Kael and Ivory memories and the twelve years and the integration and the children's names and the duel and the den — was still there.

Everything that had been built.

Still there.

Just without the thing that had been trying to use it.

I came back.

Kael was on the ground.

He'd collapsed — not from an attack, the specific collapse of someone whose body had been running on something that had just been removed. The wolf and the person reconnecting without the root's interference, the integration completing the final step it had been building toward.

Unconscious.

Breathing.

Present in the link in the specific way he was present when the integration was fully active rather than running in the split state the root had been producing.

I was on the ground.

I was bleeding from several places.

The cost of the extraction — not death, Silver had been right about that, but not nothing. The power reserves were depleted in the way they'd be depleted after the border battle, after the sustained shield work, after everything used at once in a sustained effort.

I was very tired.

Nina appeared.

She had been somewhere in the estate and she appeared at the edge of my vision with Jordan behind her and the specific quality of people who'd felt the root leave the link and had moved toward it.

She saw Kael.

She crossed to him.

Put her hand on his face.

Her hand was shaking.

Not dramatically. The specific small shaking of someone who'd been holding something for too long and had arrived at the end of the holding.

"He's breathing," Jordan said, behind her. He was holding something — the case, the specific sealed case with Cassium's seal on the front, the document they'd been sent for, the thing that was going to neutralize the Convention challenge and protect the pack from the legal exposure.

The document.

They'd gotten it.

The thing that was going to prove what Cassium had done. The thing that was going to give Ivory's arrangement of the bond a legal counterweight. The thing that was going to end the Convention challenge and protect Shadowmere.

Nina looked at the document in Jordan's hands.

She looked at Kael unconscious on the floor.

She looked at the empty space in the room — the space that should have been occupied by the person who'd arranged all of this, who'd built the plan and the healer network and the compound documentation and the backup verification word and the forty pages of notes and the cure and the car and the specific extraordinary everything that was Ivory.

The space that was empty.

"We got it," Jordan said, and his voice had the specific quality of something that was technically a victory and was completely hollow. "We got the document. The plan worked. The Convention challenge—"

He stopped.

Nina's face.

The thing that happened to Nina's face when she looked at the empty space and the document and Kael on the floor and understood the specific weight of the accounting — we had the document, we had the root removed, we had everything we'd come for.

And Ivory was gone.

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