Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 380

ARIA

"Protecting me," she said, and the words were quiet and flat in the way that quiet flat things from Ivory weren't actually flat. "You were protecting me. The information about me and Kael in the clinic — she'd come in with it to hurt you. And you took it and turned it into something that also protected me."

"I needed the weapon to stop working," I said. "That required addressing both angles of it."

"You could have just addressed the angle aimed at you," Ivory said. "You didn't need to close the angle aimed at me."

I didn't have a clean response to this. Because she was right — I could have simply said I wasn't threatened by what Sera described without implying that my lack of threat was because I was in an arrangement with both of them. I could have been vaguer. Left Ivory's name out of it entirely.

I hadn't.

I'd closed both angles. Without thinking about it as a choice, without calculating the protection as a goal, just — done it, because the bluff that presented itself had been the one that rendered both things harmless simultaneously.

"I'm still apologizing," I said. "For not asking first."

Ivory was quiet for three steps. Then she said: "Accepted."

Just that. Clean and simple and without conditions.

I breathed.

"The technique," she said, returning to it without transition. "What you felt on that last one — I want you to do it again. On purpose this time, not as a response to the disc. Can you locate the anchor from here?"

I checked. The warmth was present, as always. I tried the distinction she'd described — not weather happening to me, but something I contained. Tried to find the center rather than the edge.

"I think so," I said.

"Hold it there," she said. "Don't release it. Just hold it."

I held it. Walked with it held, which required a kind of divided attention — the path ahead, the terrain, the growing dark, and simultaneously the internal architecture of the anchor.

"This is harder than releasing it," I said.

"Everything is harder than releasing it," she said. "Releasing is just letting go of control. Holding is control. The technique you're looking for — the one the books don't have — is about holding it in circumstances that make holding it very difficult. When you're afraid. When you're angry. When someone is saying things specifically designed to destabilize you." She looked at me sideways. "Like Sera was."

"I almost lost it in that meeting," I said. "Twice."

"I know," she said. "The guard's report mentioned the glow."

"The guard reported—"

"Celine mentioned it to Margo," Ivory said. "And Margo tells me things of medical relevance."

"Everything goes to Margo," I said.

"Everything goes to Margo," she confirmed. "It's efficient."

Something moved ahead and to the left simultaneously — two discs, launched from different positions, aimed to make handling one cleanly mean being hit by the other. The anchor held. I calculated in the half-second available, split the blast into two focused points of impact rather than one wide one, and felt both discs shatter.

I stood with my hands still raised, breathing harder, looking at the scattered clay on both sides of the path.

Ivory was looking at my hands.

"You split it," she said. There was something in her voice that I hadn't heard before — not the clinical assessment tone. Something that was genuine. Surprised, almost. "You split a single discharge into two separate targeted impacts."

"Is that not normal?" I said.

"No," she said. "It is extremely not normal. It shouldn't be possible at your stage of development." She was still looking at my hands. "How did it feel?"

"Like dividing attention," I said. "Like — both things were happening at the same time but I wasn't split between them. More like I expanded to cover both."

Ivory was quiet for a moment.

"The bloodline is further along than I estimated," she said, and the words had the quality of a healer revising a prognosis. "I thought we were weeks from what you just did. We might be days."

"Is that good?" I said.

"It's significant," she said, which was not quite the same thing but contained it. "Come on."

We continued down the path. The slope was leveling now, approaching the wide flat area at the base of the hill that was used for extended training runs. The light had shifted further into dusk — not dark yet, but the amber was going blue at the edges. I could still see clearly, which was either the remaining daylight or something about the power's effect on my perception at this stage.

"The letter," I said, because I still had questions and she'd said ask one, walk through a trap, she'd answer.

"What about it," she said again.

"I'm not angry," I said. "I want to say that clearly before anything else. I've thought about it — how I came to be here, what you arranged, what it means that the whole thing was facilitated. And I'm not angry."

"Why not," she said, and the question was genuine inquiry rather than challenge.

"Because you were watching him disappear," I said. "And you found a solution. And the solution happened to involve me as the mechanism. And the mechanism—" I paused, choosing the words. "The mechanism got here and turned out to be a person. Which wasn't something you could have fully predicted. And what that person has done since arriving wasn't in your letter." I looked at the path ahead. "Jayden said that. Almost exactly."

"Jason says useful things," Ivory said, in the tone she used when she was acknowledging something while being careful about how much warmth she let into the acknowledgment.

"He does," I said.

"He's good for you," she said, and then seemed to catch the phrasing and add: "Not in the romantic sense. In the sense of someone who sees you clearly and doesn't have an agenda about it."

"I know what you meant," I said.

Silence for a moment. The flat ground was approaching. I could see the wider space opening up ahead, the training run markers visible in the fading light.

"What I want to say about the letter," I said, "is that I understand why you didn't tell me. Why you couldn't tell me — not couldn't as in were unable, but couldn't as in there was no version of telling me that worked. I arrived already complicated. Already carrying Damon's rejection and the circumstances of the bond and the pack's feelings about it. Being told at any point in those first months that my presence here had been arranged by the person the pack felt should have been Luna—" I stopped. "There was no good time for that information."