Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 427

ARIA

"She left a trail," I said.

Everyone looked at me.

"The woman from the lower slope escaped from the training traps using teleportation," I said. "The energy signature is specific. It's here in this room — I can feel it, the same way I felt it on the lower slope." I looked at Nina. "She's been tracking Ivory for eighteen months. She knows Shadowmere's territory. She came to the clinic and she took Ivory and she left."

"Using the same teleportation," Nina said.

"The same signature," I said. "Which means if she's used it before — in other places, other situations, if there's any record of it being used elsewhere—"

"I can map it," Elite said, from the doorway.

I hadn't heard her arrive. She was standing there with the composed efficiency of someone who'd been briefed on the way in and had already begun the calculations.

"The power signature of teleportation leaves traces in specific types of stone and specific types of magical record," she said. "If she's used this method to arrive at and depart from multiple locations over eighteen months of hunting, there will be a pattern. A series of locations that connect to a network." She looked at Nina. "I need the intelligence files on everything we have about her since last night's incident."

"Kael's documentation folder," Nina said. "Cross-referenced with the facility files."

"I need three hours," Elite said.

"You have two," Kael said. His voice was the operational one. The flat Alpha version that had moved past processing and into doing.

"Two," Elite agreed. She looked at Kael. "She's alive. They needed her alive. If they wanted her dead they would have done it in the clinic. They took her because she knows something or because she is something to them — leverage or information or access. Dead she's useless for those purposes."

"She's alive," Kael said. Not the emotional acknowledgment — the tactical acceptance of information that was being used.

"She's alive," Elite confirmed.

"Two hours," he said. "Then we have a location."

Elite left.

Jordan was already on his communication device, pulling the intelligence files that Elite would need, moving with the focused efficiency of the post-decision phase when the feeling had been set aside and the work was what mattered.

Nina looked at Kael.

"The wolf," she said.

"I know," he said.

"If you shift before we have a location—"

"I know," he said. "I'll hold it." He looked at the security footage, still running, still showing the empty room. "I'll hold it until we have somewhere to direct it."

"Jordan will stay with you," Nina said. "Aria—" she looked at me.

I was already thinking about the bond. About the reaching I'd done on the lower slope. About what Ivory had told me about using it — *not the mindlink, the bond. You're his mate. He can sense you.*

"I can try to find her," I said.

Nina looked at me.

"The bond carried a picture to Kael on the lower slope," I said. "I sent him a visual, a location, a sense of what was happening. If that direction works — if the bond can send—" I stopped. "Can it receive?"

Nina looked at Kael.

Kael looked at me.

"I don't know," he said. "The bond has been—" he paused, "—strained. For months. What you reached me with on the lower slope worked because you pushed it hard and I was already moving in that direction." He met my eyes. "But if you could send — and she's conscious—"

"She was conscious when they took her," I said, looking at the footage. "She went down but she was moving when they picked her up. If she's awake where they've taken her—"

"She might send," Kael said.

Not through the bond. We didn't have the bond with Ivory. But the bloodline — the specific connection between what I was and what she'd been looking for when she'd found me. Ivory had known the bloodline like she knew everything she'd spent years studying. She'd spent four years learning it inside out.

She knew how to reach children of the moon.

"She sent Kael a letter before she got taken," I said. "She put it where he'd find it rather than saying it because she knew how he'd respond. She planned for outcomes. She left the note under the bed. She's thinking."

"She's always thinking," Jordan said, from the doorway, and his voice had the quality it had had when he'd looked at the footage for the first time.

"If she's thinking," I said, "she's planning what she can control. And one thing she can control—" I looked at Kael, "—is sending information. The bloodline connection. She knows it from four years of study. She knows it better than I do."

"You want to reach for her," Kael said.

"I want to be available to receive," I said. "If she's sending — if she's trying to get information out — the bloodline is the channel she'd use. She knows it. She knows how to use it."

"Can you tell the difference," Nina said, "between her sending and you producing something from your own anxiety?"

"I'll have to try," I said. "And trust the anchor."

Nina looked at me for a moment. The specific assessment she brought to things she was deciding about.

"Kael stays with Jordan," she said. "You find somewhere quiet. You try to receive. You tell me immediately if anything comes through." She held my gaze. "Anything. Even fragments. Even things that don't make immediate sense."

"Yes," I said.

"Two hours," she said. "Elite needs two hours. You have two hours."

"I'll start now," I said.

I left the security room and walked through the clinic building and out into the pack grounds where the evening was fully dark now, the amber lighting of Shadowmere doing its usual work against the dark, the pack doing its evening things entirely unaware that in the clinic there was an empty bed and a sleeping healer and a security footage loop showing a room being emptied of the most important person in it.

I found the east courtyard. The bench. The place I'd ended up before when I needed somewhere quiet to process things.

I sat on it.

Found the anchor — warm, present, settled.

Breathed.

The bond ran from somewhere in my chest outward and kept going. I'd reached through it in one direction before — toward Kael, on the lower slope, pushing the picture with everything I had.

Now I tried the other direction. Not pushing. Receiving. Being available. Being present with the channel open rather than forcing something through it.

I thought about Ivory's handwriting. The compressed efficiency of it. The annotated margins. The names on the voice resonance list. Mine, three weeks ago, from someone who'd been paying attention from the beginning.

*They were coming for me.*

*I couldn't afford you getting hurt.*

*I'm sorry.*

I held the anchor and kept the channel open and waited.

The pack grounds were quiet around me.

Elite had two hours. I had two hours.

Somewhere, Ivory was thinking. And I was going to be available if she reached. That was what I could do. That was what I was going to do.

The pearl was warm in my pocket. I breathed.

And waited.

a/n: People will be happy if ivory died, oh well.