Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 411

ARIA

"What about him," Nina said.

"He's been restless in ways I've been attributing to other things," Kael said. "The bond adjustment. The stress of the Hunt. The situation with—" he stopped. "Other things. But if the root is still there and the wolf is more attuned to the construction than I am—"

"He might be feeling something you're not aware of," Nina said.

"Yes," Kael said.

"We need to know what activates the root," Nina said. "What would trigger it from dormant to active. What the caster intended it to do when it activated." She looked at Kael steadily. "Ivory has information about the construction. What she took from the collector and the other sources. She needs to share all of it."

"She said she would," he said.

"She'll share the version she's decided is the useful portion," Nina said. "You know that. What she said was considerably more than she was going to tell you, which is still not everything." She paused. "When she's rested. In the thirty-five hours. Go back and get the rest."

"She'll say she told me everything," he said.

"She'll have told you considerably more than she usually tells anyone," Nina said. "Which will contain gaps you'll have to find." She held his gaze. "You're good at finding the gaps."

"I'm better at it than I used to be," he said. "But she's also better at hiding them than she used to be."

"It's been an arms race," Nina said.

"For twelve years," he agreed.

He turned back to the concrete wall. Looked at the gap he'd made. Then at the rest of the wall, which was intact and waiting.

"Don't," Nina said.

"I wasn't—"

"You were considering it," she said. "I know the shoulder position."

He looked at his shoulder. Looked at her. Looked at the wall.

"The wall didn't do anything," I said.

"The wall is structurally significant to the training complex," Nina said. "The training complex is used by three hundred and forty-two pack members on a rotating basis."

"Three hundred and forty-three," Kael said. "As of the recent intake."

"Three hundred and forty-three," Nina agreed. "Who use the structural integrity of the walls."

Kael looked at the gap for another moment.

"Do you know how angry someone has to be," he said, "to hunt a person for eighteen months? To specifically track them and specifically avoid everyone else and specifically wait for the one moment they step outside the perimeter just so you can get to them alone?"

"Yes," Nina said. "I do know."

"That woman," he said, "came onto the lower slope with enough hate to have been building it for a year and a half. And Ivory has been managing it. Filing it. Color coding it." He made a sound. "She was on a training run with Aria. For Aria. She wasn't there for herself, she was there because Aria needed the terrain and the traps. She put herself outside the perimeter for someone else's training and she already knew someone was hunting her."

"She assessed the risk as acceptable," I said. "Given the defenses she'd built into the traps."

"She's not supposed to be taking those risks alone anymore," he said. "That was the deal. Not alone. She agreed."

"She agreed ten minutes ago," Nina said.

"She agreed," he said. "It still—" he stopped. "The deal she made before was also alone. Every deal she made about this search was alone because she didn't tell us the deals existed."

"Yes," Nina said.

"If that woman hadn't attacked her last night," he said. "If she hadn't stepped out in a moment of apparent victory and announced herself, we would not have known. We would still not know. Ivory would be in the clinic today having treated a routine shoulder injury and we would think it was training related and she would have kept—" he stopped. "She would have kept going."

"Yes," Nina said. "She would have."

He was quiet.

"Part of me," he said slowly, "wants to be angry at the attacker for last night. For the bolt. For the shoulder." He paused. "And part of me thinks that if the attacker hadn't done what she did last night, we would have found out about sixty-nine incidents at a funeral."

The word sat in the air.

None of us addressed it directly.

"We didn't," Nina said. "She's in the clinic with her rope and her books and her thirty-five hours."

"She's in the clinic," he said.

"And the attacker brought it to our attention," Nina said. "Which is the only thing about last night we can be—" she chose the word carefully, "—grateful for. However qualified that gratitude is."

"However qualified," he said.

"You were going to say something," I said, "about whether you should thank the attacker before killing her."

"I was not going to say that out loud," he said.

"You were thinking it," Nina said.

"I was thinking something adjacent to it," he said. "Which is different."

"The attacker escaped," Nina said. "Silver bolts through the knee. She's injured but functional based on last night's assessment. She'll need medical treatment herself before she's capable of another attempt. That gives us time."

"Hell," Kael said, and the word came out with a quality that wasn't quite a laugh but was adjacent to one — the specific dark amusement of someone who'd been presented with information they found simultaneously infuriating and impressive. "If she hadn't stepped out of the pack's range of those modifications, if the attacker had tried to come through the main territory — she'd have had to ask permission to enter. Leave everyone else alone. Navigate to a specific office. Wait for her turn."

"Just to attack Ivory," Nina said, in the tone of someone following the logic to its conclusion.

"Just to attack Ivory," he confirmed. "Ivory built a pack-wide security modification specifically around the threat of people who had been hunting her, in such a way that if the person had come through normal channels they'd have had to politely wait in a queue to commit an assassination."