Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 307

KAEL

The name had never been a title I'd sought. Had been given to me in the early years of my leadership, back when I was younger and rawer and had not yet developed the finely calibrated emotional control that ruling a pack for a long time eventually imposed on you. Back when my wolf's rage had been closer to the surface, when I'd been faster to shift and slower to come back from it, when other alphas had looked at me and seen something unpredictable enough to fear rather than just to respect.

I'd grown out of it. Or into it differently — controlled it better, expressed it more deliberately rather than letting it run. Had thought that was an improvement. Had believed, for years, that the alpha who thought before he acted was more effective than the one who simply acted.

But sitting in the wreckage of ten punching bags with diplomatic letters calling my leadership into question, I was aware that the reputation I'd let soften had been serving a function I'd underestimated.

The fear that Kael Deranged generated had been keeping certain threats from testing me. Had been doing deterrence work invisibly, in the background, preventing challenges from emerging that other alphas might otherwise have brought. And now that deterrence had apparently degraded — now that word had gotten out that my mate had visited our enemy and I'd responded by calling her inadequate at a public trial rather than by doing anything that looked like what the killer wolf would have done — the calculations were shifting.

They were reassessing whether Shadowmere was a pack worth messing with, or whether the alpha's softened edge had opened a door that someone should step through.

"The irony," I said, "is that Kael Deranged would have handled this worse. Would have handled Aria and Damon and the whole situation in ways that would have been cleaner in the short term and catastrophic in the long term. Would have made decisions out of wounded pride that I'd have been paying for in pack stability for years." I looked at Jordan. "And yet somehow the fact that I didn't do that has convinced people I'm manageable."

"You're not manageable," Jordan said, with a firmness that suggested it wasn't negotiable.

"Three alphas disagree."

"Three alphas are trying to read your response to a personal betrayal as evidence about your political capability," Jordan said. "That's a category error. What you do about Aria and what you'd do to someone who threatened Shadowmere's borders are completely different things and they know it. They're just looking for leverage and testing whether you're rattled enough to make bad decisions."

"Maybe," I said. I wasn't fully convinced.

Jordan leaned back on his stool. "Alpha Marcus. He's the one you're actually worried about."

I didn't answer, which was its own answer.

"He's not wrong about the optics," Jordan continued. "He's wrong that the optics mean what the other alphas think they mean, but he's not wrong about what they're seeing. You kept Aria as Luna after the confession. Kept her on restricted territory instead of handling it more severely. And now there's a celebration incoming where you're going to have to stand next to her in public and figure out how to present a unified front when the entire pack knows you're in the middle of a significant trust breakdown."

"I'm aware of the situation," I said dryly.

"So what's the plan?" Jordan asked. "Because going into that celebration with no plan, with everything unresolved, with the visiting alphas already primed to look for weakness — that's how you hand them the narrative they're looking for."

I stared at the ruined bag on the training room floor. At the sand scattered across the mats, the foam padding split and compressed from the force of too many strikes. It looked like how I felt — the exterior destroyed, the interior exposed, everything meant to be contained now spread out in a mess that would take effort to clean up.

The honest answer to Jordan's question was that I didn't have a plan. Had been avoiding planning the way I'd been avoiding Aria and avoiding Ivory and avoiding every difficult conversation that was waiting for me, because having a plan required making decisions and making decisions required knowing what I actually wanted and right now what I actually wanted was a collection of contradictory things that I hadn't sorted into any kind of hierarchy yet.

I wanted Aria to have been different than she was. Wanted to trust her with the automatic ease that mate bonds were supposed to generate, the instinctive certainty that your partner was on your side regardless of everything. Wanted the betrayal to be smaller than it was, or the trust to have been less complete before it broke, so the gap between before and after wouldn't feel so significant.

I wanted Ivory to not be lying in a healing tent with three years of returned grief and justifiable rage at everything that had happened. Wanted the curse to have broken differently, or for Aria to have come from different circumstances, or for the world to have arranged itself in some configuration where I could have protected everyone instead of having to make choices that left people bleeding.

I wanted my wolf to settle. Wanted him to stop that restless pacing, stop insisting on things he couldn't have, stop making faithfulness feel like a constant active choice rather than something that simply was. I was a man who kept his commitments. I needed the animal inside me to understand that this was non-negotiable and stop treating it like a matter still under debate.

And I wanted the visiting alphas to understand that Shadowmere wasn't soft and I wasn't manageable and whatever narrative they were constructing out of my recent choices was built on a fundamental misreading of who I was. Wanted to communicate that without doing something that would prove their point by being disproportionate and reactionary rather than genuinely authoritative.

None of those things were compatible. Several of them were mutually exclusive.

"What I know," I said finally, "is that going into that celebration without at least talking to Aria beforehand would be worse than any of the other options. Whatever I'm feeling, however long I need to be angry — I can't stand next to her in front of visiting alphas while we're openly in the middle of a breakdown. They'd read it immediately. They're good at reading it, it's what they come to these things to assess."

"So you'll talk to her," Jordan said. Not a question.