Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 475

ARIA

Not immediately next to him. The specific distance that was close enough to communicate presence and far enough to not be demand.

The garden was warm in the morning light. The sounds of Nina and Jordan working on the traps came from the northern section. Ivory's intermittent commentary carried from the bench — she'd stopped supervising but was talking to the plants near her, which was its own form of supervision.

I'd been thinking about what to say since breakfast.

Silver, inside, was quiet. Not absent — the warmth of her was constant now, the specific presence of something that had always been there and was now available. But quiet, the way she went quiet when something was happening that she thought I needed the space to manage.

I opened my mouth.

"I'm sorry," Kael said.

I closed my mouth.

He was looking at the hedge. At the old planting, the established root systems. He had the quality of someone who'd been sitting with something for a while and had arrived at the starting point.

"For last night," he said. "For putting you in that position."

"You didn't—" I started.

"I did," he said. "I was focused on Ivory. On getting to her. I didn't think through the full picture of what they'd do when we left. I thought the pack had what it needed, and I thought the bunker would hold, and I made a decision."

"The bunker," I said.

"You don't know about the bunker," he said. Not accusation — statement.

"I know there's one," I said. "I've never been told where it is or what it does."Nobody told me," I said.

"No," he said. "Nobody told you. We should have told you." He looked at the hedge. "There's a longer version of this. Of all the things that should have been different from the beginning. I've been—" he stopped.

"I know," I said.

"I've been keeping quiet about it," he said. "Not because I didn't know I should say it. Because saying it means having a conversation I've been not ready to have."

"You didn't know what was coming," I said.

"I knew enough," he said. "I knew Damon was at the facility. I knew he was connected to the network. I knew the network's pattern was to create secondary pressure when the primary operation ran." He looked at the hedge across from us, the same one Ivory had been talking to three days ago when I'd come to the east courtyard to try reaching her through the bloodline.

"I was focused on Ivory. I knew the bunker protocol existed. I trusted the pack defenses to hold a containment scenario." He paused.

"I didn't think about what it would look like from where you were standing, with none of that information, knowing only that the leadership was gone and something was approaching the border."

"Nina briefed me on the protocols after," I said. "The bunker. The emergency food stores. All of it."

"After," he said. "Not before."

"No," I said. "Not before."

He was quiet for a moment. I waited.

"The bunker," he said, "is one of the first things we built after the curse started. Nina and Jordan and Ivory designed it together. Kael-resistant. Because there were moments in the curse year when we needed somewhere that would hold if the wolf got out fully and I was no longer — when I was no longer the person doing the containment." He looked at his hands.

"They built something that could survive what I was during the worst of it. Reinforced with Ivory's modified compounds, specific structural elements that Elite designed, access points that required two-person authentication so I couldn't be tricked into letting them in while the wolf was dominant." He paused. "It was built for emergencies. Real emergencies. And I assumed you knew it existed."

"Why would I have known," I said.

"Because you should have been told," he said. "From the beginning. When you arrived. The emergency protocols. All of them. Not because you were my mate — because you were in the pack. Because people in the pack deserve to know the infrastructure exists." He looked at me directly. "I didn't tell you because I kept not deciding to tell you. Kept finding reasons why now wasn't the right moment. Too much was happening. The investigation was still running. Trust was still—" he stopped. "I was using the incompleteness of the trust situation as a reason to keep you incomplete in the information. And in doing that I put you in a position last night where you had to make decisions without the full picture."

"I made them anyway," I said.

"You made them anyway," he said. "You made them well. That's not the point."

"What is the point," I said.

"The point is that Nina or Jordan or Ivory would have had the information," he said.

"From the start. Because they're mine and I trust them and so they get the full picture. And you're mine and I—" he stopped on the word and then continued through it, "—and I was treating you like someone who might not be and so you were getting incomplete. And that's not fair. That's not how this works."

He was quiet for a moment. "It's underground. Below the clinic. Ivory built it during the curse years — when the wolf was at its worst and she was worried about containing the fallout if he got out of the den." He paused. "She designed it to be resistant to wolf strength and wolf senses. To hold against me specifically, because she knew what I was capable of at my worst." He looked at his hands. "When I left last night, I knew if things went wrong that the pack had the bunker as a last resort."

"And Ivory built it while being hunted," I said.

"While being hunted by people who could track moon bloodlines," he said. "She didn't know about you then — she knew you were coming, she was tracking the bloodline, but she didn't know who you were or what you were capable of. The bunker's defenses are calibrated for the threats she knew about. One of those threats was moon-adjacent power. They kept it from me, but I was told later on"