Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 432

ARIA

Elite arrived at the office door at the ninety-minute mark.

She came with a folder — thinner than the morning's folder, more targeted, the product of focused intelligence work rather than comprehensive documentation. She also came with an expression that I'd learned to read as Elite's version of a difficult situation: composed, operational, with the specific quality of someone who'd found what they were looking for and didn't entirely like what they'd found.

Kael had unbolted the office door approximately forty minutes after our corridor conversation. He'd come out looking like someone who'd won a significant internal argument through sheer stubbornness — the wolf quieter, the man present, both of them worn at the edges. He'd sat behind his desk. We'd arranged ourselves in the office with the specific efficiency of people who'd decided that sitting on the floor was the previous stage of the evening and this was the next one.

Jordan had found a chair. Nina had her notebook. I'd taken the corner position near the window that gave me sightline to both the door and Kael.

Elite came through the door and didn't sit.

"Five possible locations," she said, opening the folder. "Based on the teleportation signature pattern, cross-referenced with the incident files, cross-referenced with known facilities associated with the people in Kael's documentation." She spread five sheets on the desk. "Three are within a day's travel. Two are further — one significantly further, one borderline."

Kael was looking at the sheets with the flat operational focus he used when he was reading intelligence and not yet drawing conclusions.

"Confidence level on each," Nina said.

"Distributed," Elite said. "Twenty-three percent on the most likely. Twelve on the least likely. Nothing significant enough to make a single choice obvious." She paused. "We have limited time. Every hour that passes—"

"I know," Kael said.

"The five locations can't all be checked sequentially without the delay becoming critical," Elite said. "We need more information to narrow it."

"What else do you have," Kael said.

Elite paused for exactly one second — the pause of someone deciding how to present something they knew was going to land badly.

"Damon Blackwood," she said.

The office went a specific kind of quiet.

Kael didn't move. Didn't change expression. The stillness of something that had gone past the reactive stage into something colder.

"He was sighted," Elite said. "Near the third location on the list. Within the last forty-eight hours. Reliable source — pack intelligence from the southern territory, cross-checked against two independent reports."

"Damon," Kael said. His voice was the flattest I'd heard it.

"Near the third location," Elite said. "Which is a facility that appears in the documentation folder under two of the red-tab incidents." She held his gaze. "He has a presence in the network. Possibly peripheral, possibly deeper. We don't know the extent."

"Of course he does," Kael said.

He picked up the glass on his desk. It was empty — had been empty since we'd come into the office. He looked at it for a moment and then set it back down with the careful precision of someone choosing not to break it.

"Aria's ex-boyfriend," he said, and the words were not directed at me, were not asking anything of me, were just the flat statement of someone naming a thing they didn't want to be naming. "Has to be in this."

"He has reasons," Elite said.

"He has multiple reasons," Kael said. "I'm aware of the reasons."

"Ivory arranged Aria's removal from his pack," Elite said. "Ivory led him to the decoy mating ground that bought time for the bond to form. From his perspective, Ivory is responsible for—"

"Losing Aria," Kael said. "Yes." He looked at me briefly — just briefly, the glance of someone acknowledging something was in the room and choosing not to make it larger than it was. "He lost what he had and he has a partner in whatever this network is, and the partner had reasons of their own to go after Ivory, and the combination of those two sets of reasons—"

"Made Ivory a shared target," Nina said.

"Made Ivory a shared target," Kael confirmed.

He looked at the five location sheets. Then he looked at Nina. "The investigation," he said. "Aria's case. The prison escape. Where are we."

Nina was very still for a moment.

"Nothing new," she said. "I've been unable to connect Aria to Damon's escape from the prison. The evidence doesn't support it." She paused. "The only new connection is the teleportation signature."

Kael frowned. The kind that pulled at everything in his face.

"The prison escape," he said. "The night it happened. The reports mentioned unusual lighting. The guards described it as a facility malfunction — electrical, they said. Faulty wiring in the security systems."

He looked at Nina.

Nina went very still.

Then she pulled out her device and brought up the clinic footage. The same footage we'd watched in the security room — but she was already moving through it, going to the specific moment, the arrival of the woman from the lower slope and her companion.

The blinding light.

The specific quality of it — the way it wasn't the light of an explosion or a power surge but the light of something moving between places, the teleportation that had a signature I could feel in the anchor's expanded awareness.

Kael paused it. Right at the peak of the light.

"That," he said.

"That," Nina said, and her voice had the quality of someone arriving at a conclusion they should have reached earlier and were not forgiving themselves for the delay. "The prison. The night of Damon's escape. The guards described—"

"Faulty wiring," Jordan said, from his chair. He was looking at the frozen footage with the intelligence analyst's expression — the rapid connection of things that had been stored separately and were now being placed together. "The same kind of light. We dismissed it as the security system failing."

"It wasn't the security system," Kael said.

"It was her," Nina said. "The woman from the lower slope. Or someone with the same power. They teleported into the prison and got Damon out." She looked at the footage. "They were already connected. Before last night. Before the attack on Ivory. Before the clinic."

"He traded something," Kael said. "For the escape. Information, access, cooperation. Whatever they needed from him, he gave it. And they got him out and he pointed them at Ivory and—"

He stopped.

He stood up.

Jordan and Nina and Elite had approximately the same reaction to him standing up — the specific alertness of people who'd learned what it meant when Kael moved with that quality. It meant something was about to happen and the question was only what.

"Where is Vesper," he said.