Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 306

KAEL

"And now?" Jordan prompted.

"Now she knows exactly what she meant to me and exactly what she lost." I turned the water bottle in my hands, giving my fingers something to work with. "And I can't pretend the distance is about her not knowing anymore. It's just about me choosing Aria. Choosing the bond. Choosing what I said I'd choose."

"Which is the right choice," Jordan said. "For the record. The bond is real. Breaking it would be—"

"I know what breaking it would be," I said. "I'm not considering it. That's not what this is." I rubbed the back of my neck with my free hand. "This is just — there's a grief involved in doing the right thing. Nobody talks about that. About how choosing correctly doesn't make the cost of choosing disappear. It just means you carry it while also telling yourself you have no right to complain because you made the right call."

Jordan was quiet in the particular way that meant he was listening hard.

I pushed forward because I'd gone this far and stopping now would only leave the unfinished thought to fester. "My wolf has never been fully at peace with the bond to Aria. Not the way bonds are supposed to settle, supposed to feel like coming home rather than like a reasonable decision you've made and committed to. He accepts it. He doesn't reject it. But deep down, in the part of me that doesn't think in words or rationale or pack stability calculations—" I stopped. "Deep down it's still Ivory. It has been for three years. It will probably be for a long time yet."

The admission cost something. I could feel the specific weight of it leaving me, the way certain truths were lighter after you said them and heavier while you were carrying them alone.

Jordan didn't look surprised. He looked like someone confirming a thing he'd already suspected. "And that's why you can't go to Aria with righteous fury about Damon when your wolf's doing the same thing about someone else."

"Yes," I said. "That's why."

The training room was quiet except for the distant sounds of the pack moving through its morning. Somewhere outside, someone was running sprints along the perimeter — I could hear the rhythm of it, the steady impact of feet against packed earth.

"I guess," Jordan said carefully, "the letters from the visiting alphas aren't helping."

I let out a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "No. They're not helping."

The letters had arrived yesterday morning, tucked into the stack of diplomatic correspondence that had accumulated during the Hunt. I'd opened them after my meeting with the Ghost Council's representatives, alone in my office with the cold morning light coming in gray through the windows, and had spent a significant amount of time afterward sitting very still and breathing through the urge to crush every piece of paper in the room.

Three letters. Three alphas who'd received their invitations to the celebration and had responded with the kind of diplomatic language that was specifically designed to communicate contempt while maintaining technical plausibility that they'd been respectful.

Alpha Corvin of Northgate had written about *looking forward to observing Shadowmere's unique approach to mate bond verification* — phrasing that translated cleanly as *I can't believe you kept her and I want to see this catastrophe in person.* His postscript had noted that he'd be bringing his own mate, who was *an exemplary Luna in every traditional sense*, which was the kind of thing you only added when you were making a point rather than just providing travel information.

Alpha Reeves from the eastern territories had sent a letter that was almost entirely subtext, every sentence a studied exercise in diplomatic ambiguity. He'd written that he was *eager to discuss recent developments in Shadowmere's leadership structure* and hoped we could find time during the celebration for *a private conversation about stability and the role of the Luna position in maintaining it.* Translation: he thought I'd lost my edge. Thought that keeping Aria was weakness. Wanted to assess in person whether Shadowmere's Alpha was still someone worth taking seriously.

The third letter had been the worst. Alpha Marcus of the Greystone pack, who I'd known for eleven years, who'd fought alongside me in three territorial disputes, who'd called me a friend to my face on multiple occasions and apparently felt comfortable enough in our relationship to drop the diplomatic packaging entirely. His letter had been blunt in ways that were almost refreshing for their lack of pretense: *Word's reached us about the Hunt and about your mate. I'll be honest because I think you've earned honesty — there are alphas talking. Saying Shadowmere's gone soft. Saying Kael's lost the wolf that used to put other alphas in the ground for looking sideways at what was his. Is this the story you want your pack telling?*

He'd meant it as a friendly warning. I understood that. Marcus was the kind of man who expressed concern by telling you exactly what people were saying about you, because he believed the information was more useful than the comfort of not knowing.

He wasn't wrong that they were talking. Wasn't wrong about what they were saying.

They were saying I wasn't the same alpha anymore. Saying that the man who'd killed visiting delegations for disrespecting Ivory — who'd shifted back from wolf form just long enough to put a diplomatic envoy on the ground and then walked away — had somehow been replaced by someone who let his mate visit their enemy in secret and then stood in front of the pack and told her she wasn't good enough instead of handling it quietly and decisively the way a real alpha would.

They were saying Kael Deranged was gone. That whatever I'd become, it was softer and more manageable and not particularly frightening.

"Three alphas," I said to Jordan, "who blatantly think my mate is a joke. That I was too lenient. That I'm not —" I stopped, the phrase catching in my throat with something like bitterness and something like grief. "That I'm not the killer wolf anymore. That I'm not Kael Deranged."