Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 428

ARIA

The anchor wasn't finding anything.

I sat in the east courtyard for thirty minutes with the channel open and the pearl warm in my pocket and everything I had oriented toward receiving rather than sending, and nothing came through. No fragments, no pictures, no impression of anything that felt like it originated outside myself. Either Ivory was still unconscious from the blast — which was possible, point blank range even with the shield was significant — or she was conscious and choosing not to send, which was also possible and entirely consistent with everything I was learning about how she operated.

She probably knew exactly how the bloodline connection worked and how to use it, from four years of studying it. If she wasn't using it, there was a reason. Either she couldn't or she'd decided that sending information out was a risk she wasn't willing to take yet. If her captors could detect the power signature of a transmission the way I'd been able to detect the teleportation signature in the clinic, then sending anything would tell them she had the capacity and the connection.

She would have thought of that.

She thought of everything.

I stopped waiting for something that wasn't coming and decided to do something useful instead, which was the same conclusion Ivory herself would have reached in approximately half the time I'd taken to get there.

The clinic had told me what Ivory's state was when they took her. The east courtyard had told me that the bloodline connection wasn't producing anything yet. The next useful thing was to know how Kael was doing, because I'd felt something change in the pack grounds when I'd come through them from the courtyard — a quality that wasn't visible but was present, the way weather was present before it arrived. The expanded awareness Ivory had been developing in me caught things now that I hadn't been able to catch before, and what I was catching in the direction of the main building had the specific quality of something that needed attention.

I got up from the bench and went.

---

I found them outside Kael's office.

Not standing. Sitting. On the floor outside the door to his office, which was a detail that landed wrong immediately — Nina and Jordan were not floor-sitters, were not the kind of people who ended up on floors in professional contexts. They sat behind desks and in briefing chairs and at conference tables and on benches in the east courtyard when they were visiting someone. Not on the floor outside a closed office door.

The door was bolted from the outside.

That was the second wrong detail. I looked at it twice to be sure — the bolt system Shadowmere used on internal doors was minimal, practical, designed for privacy rather than security. This one had something additional against it. Not furniture — I could see what Jordan had done, using the specific wedge mechanism that existed for exactly this kind of internal securing, the kind you could install from outside.

They'd locked Kael in his office from the outside.

Nina had her head on Jordan's shoulder. Her eyes were open but she was looking at nothing specific, the unfocused attention of someone whose mind was somewhere else. Jordan was looking at the door with the expression of someone who'd been looking at it for a while and had run out of useful things to do with the looking, his hand moving in slow circles on Nina's back.

Telling her it was going to be okay.

I'd heard the words from the corridor before I'd turned the corner — Jordan's voice, low and steady, the specific rhythm of someone saying a thing because the thing needed to be said and keeping saying it because stopping felt like abandoning it.

They saw me at the same time.

Nina came up from Jordan's shoulder immediately, the professional posture assembling itself with the speed she always brought to the transition from private to observed. But it wasn't complete — the process was visible in a way it usually wasn't, the reassembly taking a fraction longer than normal, the result not quite achieving the full professional neutral.

She looked at me. "Did anything come through."

"Nothing," I said. "Not yet."

She nodded. The nod of someone receiving a report they'd expected and didn't want.

I looked at the bolted door. At the two of them on the floor. At the specific quality of the space — the way they'd positioned themselves with the unconscious efficiency of people who'd been in similar positions before and had a established how this went.

"Why are you out here," I said. "Someone could walk by. People will notice."

"We know," Jordan said.

"We're keeping it low," Nina said. "As long as we can."

"Why are you on the floor," I said.

"Because we don't want to leave," Nina said, and the words were simple and direct in the way that happened when pretense had run out. "We can't leave him alone in there and we can't go in, so we're here."

I looked at the bolt.

"What's happening in there," I said.

Jordan and Nina looked at each other. The exchange between them was longer than their usual ones — not the rapid complete communication of two people who'd built shorthand over years, but something more deliberate. A decision being made.

"You've been here almost a year," Jordan said finally.

"Jordan," Nina said.

"She needs to know," he said. "She's been here almost a year and she's his mate and she called through the bond on the lower slope and she's sitting in the east courtyard trying to reach Ivory through the bloodline and she still doesn't know the full picture." He looked at Nina steadily. "He should have told her. He wanted to tell her. With everything happening and his wolf unstable and Ivory gone—" he stopped. "She needs to know."

Nina was quiet for a moment.

Then she looked at me and something in her expression made the decision that Jordan had argued for.

"Sit down," she said.

"I'm fine standing," I said.