Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 383

ARIA

I stared at her. "I'm not going to — I don't even know how—"

"You're going to try," she said, with the patient firmness of someone who'd made a decision and was waiting for the other party to catch up. "It won't fully work on me. I have protections — Aryada's gifts, my own training. It'll slow me down, not stop me. Which is exactly the right level for a practice attempt." She took three steps back. "When I come at you, use the scream. Don't think about it. Feel the power and let it out as sound rather than light."

"You're going to come at me," I said.

"Yes," she said.

"You're going to attack me on a hillside in the dark," I said.

"This is training," she said, and pulled her dagger.

---

She moved fast.

Faster than I'd expected, which was the point, because Ivory in a clinical setting and Ivory in motion were two different things, and I'd only ever encountered the clinical version. She crossed the distance between us in about three seconds and I had three seconds to either do something or get stabbed with what I assumed was a training blade, and in those three seconds I did the only thing available.

The scream came out.

Not a normal scream. It came from the anchor — from the warm center of it — and moved through my throat and out of my mouth as sound that was also light, sound that had weight to it, sound that hit the air and kept hitting it.

Ivory stopped.

Not fell, not collapsed. Stopped, like someone had put a hand on her chest and pushed back slightly. For about four seconds she was still, her expression showing the specific blankness of someone whose thoughts had been briefly interrupted by something outside normal experience.

Then she shook her head — one sharp motion, clearing it — and came at me again.

I raised the shield. She hit it at speed and the impact sent both of us back a step, me from the shield's recoil and her from the resistance of it. She was strong. Stronger than I'd expected, the push against the shield carrying real force.

She was also pulling back. I could feel it — the controlled restraint of someone who was testing rather than actually trying to hurt me.

She pressed against the shield in three quick places, feeling for the thin spots, finding the one on my left side that I hadn't fully evened out yet. The blade found the gap — not deep, just a quick sting across my forearm that told me exactly where the weakness was.

"Left side," she said, stepping back.

"I know," I said, pressing my other hand against the sting. Not bad. A scratch, really.

"Fix it," she said.

I fixed it. Spread the shield more evenly, paid more attention to the left side, felt the thickness equalize.

"Again," she said.

---

We went three more rounds.

Each one pushed something different — my ability to hold the shield while using the blast, my ability to maintain the light dimming while moving quickly, my ability to locate the scream in a moment of genuine surprise when Ivory materialized from a completely unexpected direction and I had approximately one second to respond.

The scream was stronger the second time. I felt it in my own chest when it came out — a vibration that wasn't painful but was deeply strange, the power expressing itself in a register I hadn't known I could access.

Ivory stopped for longer the second time. Maybe six seconds. When she shook it off her expression had something new in it — not just clinical assessment. Something that might have been surprise, kept carefully at a distance.

I had scratches on my forearm and something that would become a bruise on my shoulder from the third round when she'd gotten through the shield completely and hit it with the flat of her blade. Not real blows. But real contact, real information about where my defenses failed and how quickly.

We sat on a flat rock at the bottom of the slope and I caught my breath and she examined my forearm with the professional detachment of someone who'd given me the scratch and was now assessing its severity.

"It'll keep," she said. "Clean it when we get back."

"I'll put it on my list," I said, which was more of a joke than a statement.

She made the small sound that meant she'd registered the humor without fully committing to laughing at it.

I was breathing slowly back to normal. The power had settled — not gone, never gone, but quieter now, the way it got after significant use.

I thought about the texts. About the weeks of reading I'd done in the restricted section, working through everything available, noting the gaps and the places where the information thinned out or became vague. There had been patterns in the vagueness. Specific things that were missing — things that someone knowledgeable would have known to look for and found absent.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"You've been asking things all evening," she said.

"This one's different," I said.

She looked at me.

"How do you know all of this?" I said. "The anchor, the light, the scream. The things that aren't in the texts." I held her gaze. "You said you like to read. But this isn't reading. This is knowing. The kind of knowing that comes from understanding something deeply, for a long time."

She was quiet.

"For the bloodline to break Kael's curse," I said, working through it as I said it, the way you worked through a thing that had been forming in the back of your mind for a while and was finally ready to come out, "there had to be something specific about the bloodline. Something in it that was compatible with the curse's structure." I paused. "Which means the curse was designed with that bloodline in mind. Or designed by someone who knew it."

Ivory was still.

"Another child of the moon," I said. "Someone with the same bloodline — or something close to it — created the curse that trapped Kael. Because that's how those kinds of curses work. They're designed to be breakable by something specific so the caster can reverse them if needed." I looked at her. "Which means you didn't just find old texts about lunar power. You went looking. You tracked the bloodline specifically. You found what you needed to know by following a trail that started with the curse itself."