Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 331

KAEL

I hadn't planned to go to the training grounds.

That was the honest truth of it. My morning had been the kind that started with intention — a list of things that needed doing, meetings that had been pushed back during the Hunt week and were now stacking up with the patient persistence of problems that didn't care about your personal circumstances — and somewhere between my office and the first meeting, my feet had taken a different route without consulting me about it.

The training grounds were busy. That was the first thing I noticed, which should have told me something because the training grounds were always busy in the mornings but not usually quite this busy, and not usually with this particular quality of activity that looked purposeful but wasn't quite moving like people who had a specific goal.

The second thing I noticed was that a significant portion of my senior leadership was apparently spending their morning leaning against the wall on the far side of the grounds.

Nina. Elite. Jordan. And — which stopped me for a moment longer than the others — Ivory, standing with Margo beside her, arms crossed, watching something in the center of the training space with an expression that I couldn't read from this distance but that had the particular quality of focused attention she gave to things she found genuinely interesting.

Aria was in the center of the grounds.

She was working with the power — the moon magic that had started manifesting during the Hunt, the thing she'd been reading about in the library's restricted section for the past week. I could see the evidence of it from where I stood: small controlled bursts of luminescent energy, silver-white against the morning light, that she was apparently attempting to direct with varying degrees of success. A training dummy on one end of the grounds had seen better days. Several targets on the other end had been repositioned recently, judging by the drag marks in the packed earth.

She hadn't noticed me yet. She was too focused on what she was doing, which was the kind of complete absorption I recognized from watching someone trying to learn something genuinely difficult — the total attention of a person for whom nothing else in the immediate world was fully registering.

I walked toward the wall contingent.

Ivory saw me coming first. Nothing changed in her posture, but she was always like that — the shift in awareness visible only if you knew how to look for it, which I did. Nina registered me half a second later with the peripheral alertness that was simply how she existed in any space. Jordan turned around completely and gave me a look that said he'd been expecting me eventually.

"What are you all doing?" I asked, coming to stand beside them.

"Wall watching," Nina said.

I looked at the wall. It was, as walls went, unremarkable. "Why?"

"The people are curious about her powers," Nina said. "But too petty to ask."

I looked out at the training grounds more carefully. She was right. The activity that had read as busy wasn't random — it was clustered, arranged with the studied casualness of people who were definitely doing their own thing and definitely not paying attention to what was happening in the center of the grounds. A group of younger wolves who were ostensibly running drills had somehow positioned their drills to run in a consistent loop that kept the center of the grounds in their sightline. Three senior pack members near the equipment storage were taking an unusually long time selecting weights.

"Hence the wall watching," I said.

"Hence the wall watching," Ivory confirmed, not looking at me. Her eyes were still on Aria. "I only pray she's not suffering from anxiety at being watched this obviously."

"I can tell them all to leave," I said.

Nina made a small sound that wasn't quite dismissal. "And give them more reasons to not like her? They're already here. They're trying to decide if she's worth their attention. Take that away and you've made the problem worse, not better."

"They wouldn't dare actually hurt their Luna," I said.

"Indifference," Ivory said, and her voice carried the flat certainty of someone stating a clinical fact, "is a significant pain to someone like her."

I didn't have an answer to that. Ivory had a way of identifying the specific shape of a wound that made arguing with her feel like arguing with someone who'd read the relevant text more carefully than you had.

We stood in a row and watched Aria work. A moment passed. Then another.

"This is ridiculous," I said.

"This is fun," Ivory said.

"Yes it is," Nina agreed, with a serenity that I found slightly concerning.

"So we all collectively agree," Elite said, appearing from somewhere to my left with the uncanny timing she always had for arriving exactly when a sentence needed completing, "that this is what we're supposed to be doing with our morning."

"Obviously," Jordan said, from my right. Then: "Oh. Look at that."

Aria had done something in the center of the grounds — a controlled burst, better than the ones before it, a proper lunar blast that sent silver light expanding outward in a shape that was clearly intentional rather than accidental. One of the watching groups actually broke their studied casualness and let out a collective sound.

The watching groups were not subtle about it. Several people near the running drills stopped entirely. Someone near the equipment storage dropped a weight, which hit the ground with a sound that made several other people look up.

Aria turned.

Every single person standing at my wall simultaneously found something else to look at. Nina developed a sudden interest in the horizon. Jordan crouched down to look at the ground near his feet as though he'd spotted something significant in the dirt. Elite turned and appeared to be reading the structural features of the wall behind us. Ivory became intensely focused on something in the middle distance that was probably not actually there.

I looked forward, which was technically neutral, and felt the combined weight of my own absurdity and the absurdity of everyone around me.

"This," I said, very quietly, "is the most undignified I have felt in a significant period of time."