Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 426

ARIA

"The note says she didn't come alone this time," I said.

"More than one person," Nina said. "Ivory fought with a damaged shoulder and her dominant hand incapacitated. Against more than one person with comparable power." She stood. "And she still sent us away. Still chose to face it alone."

Jordan appeared in the doorway behind Nina with the expression of someone who'd been running and had arrived to a scene that was worse than what they'd been running toward. He looked at the empty bed. At the sleeping healer. At the scorch marks.

"The security footage," Nina said to him. "Get me the security footage."

He was already moving.

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The security room was three corridors away from the clinic — a small space, functional rather than comfortable, with the monitoring equipment that Shadowmere used for pack perimeter and key internal spaces. The clinic had coverage from two angles. The footage was there when Nina pulled it up.

We watched it.

Ivory on the bed, the books in her working hand, her expression the specific one I'd been learning — the one that looked relaxed and wasn't, that had the thought underneath it.

She was watching the door.

This was visible once you knew to look for it. Her gaze kept returning to it. Not anxiously — not the visible checking of someone who was frightened. The calm periodic attention of someone tracking a timeline. Waiting for something at a specific time and monitoring how close that time was.

She watched Jordan leave.

Then Nina.

Then, when we'd been gone for approximately twelve minutes, she turned to the healer and said something. I couldn't hear it — the footage had no audio from this angle — but I could read the shape of it. Calm. Not alarmed. The healer looked at something Ivory was holding — the chlorophyll compound, which she'd kept from the side table somehow, palmed it during the morning while everyone was focused on other things.

The healer's expression showed hesitation. Then Ivory said something else. Then the healer — looked away. An almost imperceptible movement but visible on the footage, the specific look of someone who'd been told something and was choosing not to examine it too closely.

The healer had known.

"She told her," I said.

"She gave her the option," Nina said, her voice carefully controlled. "She told the healer what was coming and gave her the choice. The healer chose—"

"Not to fight it," Kael said. The flatness was complete now. "The healer chose to be out of it."

"She was protecting the healer," I said.

The footage continued. Ivory watching the healer's eyes close. Checking her own working hand, flexing it once, assessing. Reading something from the shelf beside the bed — she'd had the botanical guide at one point, but we'd taken it. She'd been reading something else. I couldn't see what.

Then she set it aside and looked at the door and waited.

The light came first.

It was visible even on the security footage — a brightening that wasn't from the clinic's lights, a quality of illumination that didn't belong to the room. The woman from the lower slope came through the door in the specific way she'd arrived on the training flat: stepping from one place to another without the space between. Not alone. Behind her, another shape, smaller, carrying the same quality of arriving rather than entering.

Ivory stood up.

She stood up from the bed and faced them.

With a damaged shoulder, an incapacitated dominant hand, thirty-some hours into a recovery period after a silver bolt had hit her secondary subclavian branch, she stood up from the bed and faced two people who'd come specifically for her.

"Ivory," Jordan said, from somewhere behind me. His voice had a quality I hadn't heard from him before.

On the footage: the fight.

It was short. That was the terrible thing — how short it was, given everything Ivory was and everything she could do. She fought. She used what she had — the dagger that had apparently been under the pillow, the movements I'd watched her use on the training flat, the specific efficiency of someone who knew exactly what they were doing and was doing it with the resources available to them.

She got the smaller one back against the wall. She held the larger one at distance for several seconds with something that looked like the shield — but the left arm, the damaged one, wasn't cooperating, and the shield was uneven in the specific way mine had been in training before I'd learned to maintain the thickness.

The woman from the lower slope knew where the gap was.

She'd fought Ivory before. She'd been hunting Ivory for eighteen months. She knew the gaps.

The blast came at close range. Point blank, the way Nina had described. The shield activated — I saw the gold flare of Aryada's gift, brief and bright even on the security footage — and it absorbed most of it. But most of it at point blank was still enough. Ivory went backward into the bed frame. Stayed there for three seconds, four, and then her legs stopped working the way they were supposed to and she went down.

They took her.

The woman from the lower slope held her working hand and the smaller one took the other side and they moved her toward the door and through it and the light came again and then there was nothing. The room was empty except for the sleeping healer and the disturbed bed and the pillow on the floor.

Nobody said anything for a long moment.

"The scorch marks," I said. "On the floor. The shield activated there."

"She was fighting toward the door," Nina said. "She was trying to get to the corridor. If she'd gotten to the corridor there would have been pack members—"

"She was trying to get where people would see," Jordan said.

"And she didn't make it," Kael said.

The footage was still running. The empty room. The healer asleep in the chair.

"Thirty-two minutes ago," Nina said. "Based on the timestamp."

Thirty-two minutes. We'd been in the garden. Kael had been laughing beside the pond.

She'd been in the clinic being taken by the woman who'd been hunting her for eighteen months.

I thought about the note. *I couldn't afford you getting hurt. I'm sorry.*

She'd been afraid we'd get hurt trying to stop it. She'd made the calculation that removing us from the equation was safer for us than having us there. She'd looked at the approaching inevitability of it, had understood it was coming, and had decided that the people she cared about being safe was more important than her having backup.

And she'd written *I'm sorry* at the end like the apology was for the inconvenience of being taken rather than for anything she'd done wrong.