Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 414

ARIA

He was trying to look like a man who'd had a simple encounter with some uncooperative plants and was otherwise in ordinary circumstances. He was not succeeding. His clothes were wrong for a casual visit — too practical, too dark, too many pockets in places that suggested the pockets served a specific purpose. His eyes were doing the assessment that eyes did when they were calibrating threat and opportunity simultaneously. And despite the plant damage, despite the held hand, despite the general impression of a man who'd lost a physical confrontation with foliage, there was a quality to his stillness that wasn't the stillness of someone in pain. It was the stillness of someone managing a situation.

The three fingers. The left hand.

I thought about the folder. About the color-coded tabs. About Incident One, which involved a collector, and three fingers, and Ivory accessing research materials without permission, and the collector sending people after her four separate times.

I looked at Nina.

Nina was looking at the man with the professional neutral of her most complete variety — the kind that gave nothing away about whether she'd recognized something or not. But her pen had appeared in her hand without me seeing her reach for it.

Jordan had taken a very small step sideways. Just one. The kind of step that repositioned a person relative to the exits in a space without making it obvious that exits were being considered.

The man looked toward the interior of the pack grounds with the interest of someone who knew what they were looking for and was orienting toward it.

"The healer," he said. "Is she available?"

"She's currently in the clinic," Nina said, pleasantly. "If you'd like to come inside, we can direct you."

"That would be—" he started.

Kael appeared.

He came from the direction of the main building with Jordan at his shoulder — Jordan who was somehow both here and there, which I'd given up trying to track as a spatial impossibility particular to Shadowmere's senior leadership — and his expression was the one from the training complex. The one that had come after the wall.

Except that expression had been the aftermath of processing something terrible. This expression was the active version.

He looked at the man. At the left hand. At the three fingers that hadn't healed right.

The man looked at Kael.

Something in the man's posture shifted — a micro-adjustment, the recalculation of someone who'd walked into a situation and was updating their assessment of it.

"Alpha," he said. The word came out as an acknowledgment, the instinctive recognition of hierarchy, and it told me several things about who he was and how he operated.

"Welcome to Shadowmere," Kael said.

His voice was the one I hadn't heard before. Not the measured authority of public-facing situations. Not the flat controlled version of contained anger. Something else — the version that was almost pleasant and was somehow worse than either of the others for it.

"You're here for the healer," Kael said.

"I have an injury," the man said. His eyes were doing rapid calculations now.

"Of course," Kael said. "Come in. I'll walk you to the clinic."

Nina and Jordan were looking at each other. The look of two people having a complete conversation in silence and both arriving at the same conclusion simultaneously.

"I can show him the way," Nina said.

"I've got it," Kael said, pleasantly.

"Kael," Nina said.

"It's fine," Kael said, still pleasantly.

The man hesitated for exactly the length of time it took to calculate that hesitating was worse than moving, and then he stepped inside the gate. Kael fell into step beside him with the easy companionship of a host directing a guest, and the man walked with him, and the two of them turned the corner into the main building corridor.

Nina and Jordan moved.

Not at a walking pace.

I moved with them because whatever was about to happen in that corridor was something that someone with the authority of Luna should probably be present for, and also because I'd spent enough time in Shadowmere to recognize the expression that had been on Kael's face when he'd said *come in* and I needed to see what it produced.

We came around the corner thirty seconds after Kael and the man had turned it.

Kael had jumped him.

That was the most accurate description of what I was looking at. The corridor was empty and short and had no exits from the section they'd entered, and the man was on the ground and Kael was not on the ground and the man's arm was — his arm was wrong. The angle of it. The way it was positioned relative to the rest of him.

Kael's eyes were amber.

"Come on," Kael said to the man on the ground, with the intense focus of someone entirely present in a moment. "Fight back. Come on."

"Kael," Jordan said.

"Fight back," Kael said, not to Jordan. "Come on. Fight back. You sent four separate groups after her. You put things in supply shipments. You—" he stopped and grabbed the man by the shirt front and the shoulder situation became considerably worse.

"FIGHT BACK," Kael said.

"We need answers first!" Jordan said, from behind me.

"We need him alive first!" Nina said, at the same moment, both of them moving past me toward the situation. "Kael. Kael, pull back."

The man — Alric, I thought, his name was Alric Vesper, it had been in the folder's incident one tab — was not fighting back. This was either because he was sensible or because Kael had removed the arm that would have been most useful for fighting back with, and either way the outcome was that he was on the floor not fighting back while Kael stood over him with amber eyes suggesting that the not-fighting-back was not the satisfaction he'd been looking for.

"Why are we saving the person who tried to kill Ivory," Jordan said, getting hold of Kael's arm and pulling with the significant force of someone who'd been pulling Alphas away from situations for long enough to have developed technique.