Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 470

ARIA

"The pack—" Morrison started.

"The pack," Ivory said, "will be absolutely fine. You've been told this. By the evidence of last night. Which is the evidence you're currently attempting to explain away." She looked at the council. "I want to be clear about what's happening here. The Alpha and his inner circle have spent three years keeping this pack alive through circumstances that should have broken it. The Alpha's mate spent last night holding the northern border against a force that came specifically to exploit our vulnerabilities while we were retrieving me from a basement. She did it. The pack survived. And the council's response is to question whether she was secretly on the other side." She let that sit. "I'm going to suggest that if the council genuinely cannot differentiate between the person who held the border and the person who sent a hundred and sixty wolves at it, the council may need to do some significant internal reflection about what evidence means."

"If we leave," Kael said, and his voice had settled from the dangerous quiet into something cleaner, "if all of us leave — if I take my leave of absence and take my inner circle with me — you'll have the pack you apparently want. The one where the Alpha and his mate and the people who've been building the defenses and the intelligence and the medical infrastructure aren't in positions that raise questions for you." He looked at Morrison. "You can lead it. All of you. Since you know better."

Morrison looked at the hole in the table.

He looked at Kael.

He looked at me.

He said: "You're not serious."

"I am genuinely, completely serious," Kael said.

"The pack—"

"Will be in competent hands," Kael said. "Elder Sona has demonstrated more procedural rigor this morning than the rest of the council combined. I'm confident she can manage."

Sona, who had been watching this with the expression of someone who'd sat through a great deal of pack politics and was categorizing today's version, said nothing.

Morrison said: "You can't leave the Alpha's seat—"

"Temporarily," Kael said. "Pending the review. That's what you said. Suspend my authority pending the review." He looked at Morrison with the clean flat certainty of someone who'd made a decision and wasn't going to revisit it.

"Suspended. I'll go pack."

"Kael—" Ivory started.

"I'm not leaving," Kael said to her. "I'm leaving the room. The building. The formal authority structure for however long Morrison's review takes." He looked at me. "Are you coming?"

I looked at him.

The bond was still quiet on his end. I couldn't feel his wolf. I could feel him — the human version, the man who'd just put his hand through a table when someone used his mother as a rhetorical device, who'd driven two hours and infiltrated a facility and was now standing in a council meeting choosing me over Morrison's procedural convenience.

"Yes," I said.

"Good," he said.

The door opened.

Nina and Jordan came in.

They came in with the energy of people arriving to a meeting they'd been told about and had prepared for, Jordan carrying a folder and Nina carrying two folders and both of them looking around the room with the rapid assessment of people reading a situation.

Their eyes hit the table. The hole in the table. Kael's expression. Morrison's expression. Me, standing, apparently in the process of leaving. Ivory, standing, which meant Ivory had been standing for longer than she should have been and was going to pay for that later.

"What happened," Jordan said.

"I got us all fired," Ivory said.

Nina looked at Ivory.

She looked at the table.

She looked at Morrison.

"Oh thank God," Nina said.

She dropped her folders on the table. Both of them, at the same time, with the specific intentionality of someone making a statement with objects rather than words.

Jordan looked at his folder. Then he looked at the table — at the files Nina had dropped and the folders he was holding and the meeting he'd apparently just been freed from — and he set his folder down too. Gently. With the deliberate care of someone placing something they'd been carrying for a long time in a location where it could stay without them.

"You can't just—" Morrison said.

"We can," Nina said. "And we're going to. And you know why." She looked at Morrison with the specific look that Nina had cultivated over twenty years of being the person who knew where everything was and who owed what to whom and what the actual cost of every decision had been.

"Because we have spent three years managing this pack through a crisis that none of us caused and all of us had to survive, and we have done it without complaint and without vacation and without ever once suggesting that the elder council take some of the weight. And last night, the person who took that weight, in our absence, on no notice, with thirty wolves and no formal authority and a bloodline ability she'd never tested at scale, is sitting in this room being accused of working with the man who sent those wolves."

She paused. "I am choosing, at this juncture, to take a break. I hear breaks are very good for the mental state."

"Nina," Morrison said, and this version of her name had the quality of someone invoking a long relationship.

"Morrison," Nina said, and this version of his name had the quality of someone deciding that a long relationship was not sufficient.

"You have a duty—"

"We have a duty to our Alpha," Nina said. "Who we have stood by for a very long time. Through the curse years — managing the pack, running the intelligence, maintaining the defenses, keeping the mindlink situation contained so that the pack's children weren't exposed to what the wolf was broadcasting, doing all of it while also continuing to believe that a solution was possible when most people would have given up. The solution came," she said, "in the form of his mate. Who had every reason not to help and no reason to trust this pack when she arrived. Who has been building something real here against significant resistance, including from people in this room. Who held your grandchildren safe last night in a shelter while fighting the force that came for them." She looked at the rest of the council. "So no. If we cannot acknowledge that we were wrong and she was right, then we don't get to keep pretending we're doing this for the pack's benefit. We're doing it for our comfort. And our comfort is not the pack."

Silence.

"We'll be in the east courtyard," Jordan said. "If anyone needs anything."