Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 481

JORDAN

"Yes."

Nina stared at me.

I stared back.

"We are bad people," she said.

"We are not bad people," I said. "We are people who made a reasonable decision with incomplete information and then had seventeen consecutive crises that prevented the standard review process from catching the gap."

"Jordan," she said.

"It sounds worse than it is," I said.

"It sounds," she said, "like we accidentally built a kill switch for our Luna."

"An incapacitation system," I said. "Not a kill switch. The defensive response is non-lethal. Okay it's lethal but I think incapacitation is a less extreme word."

"Oh that's much better," she said.

"It's a meaningful distinction," I said.

"We accidentally built an incapacitation system for our Luna," Nina said, "and then forgot about it for eight months while she was standing right there."

"While seventeen crises were happening," I said. "To be fair to us."

"Jordan," she said, and her voice had the specific quality of someone who was about to find something either devastating or hilarious and hadn't decided which yet. "Imagine another pack asks. Imagine they send a formal inquiry. How did your Luna die. And we have to give them the—"

She stopped.

The specific strangled sound that came out of her was not dignified.

She started laughing.

The real version, the helpless one, the kind that bent her forward and made her grab the nearest solid surface for support, which was the chair with the folders on it. The folders slid onto the floor. She didn't notice. She was past noticing folders.

I heard myself laugh too.

Not because it was funny, exactly. Because the alternative was something worse, and because it was also genuinely funny in the specific terrible way that things became funny when they were both catastrophic and completely avoidable and you were standing in a room with the person who'd been there for all of it, who understood exactly how all of the reasonable decisions had combined into an unreasonable outcome.

We looked at each other and then we both made the mistake of looking at each other while already laughing and the second round was worse than the first.

"So you see," I managed. "We would have had to explain. So you see what happened was, we built a defensive system, and then we found the Luna, and the thing is the system and the Luna have a specific incompatibility that we were aware of in the abstract but in practice had completely forgotten because—"

"Because seventeen crises," Nina wheezed.

"Seventeen consecutive crises," I said. "Each of which was genuinely the most pressing thing at the time."

"And none of which," she said, "was the bunker."

"And none of which was the bunker," I agreed.

We were both on the floor at this point. Not intentionally. The combination of the laughter and the knees that had stopped cooperating had produced a floor situation that we were both accepting with the grace available to people who'd just thoroughly lost their composure.

"The irony," Nina said, between the laughing and the recovering from the laughing, "is that Kael specifically arranged everything so that Aria would be safe."

"He left her with the whole pack," I said.

"With the pack's emergency systems," she said.

"With the emergency systems that included—"

"Don't," she said. "Don't say it again. I'm going to lose it again."

"I'm just saying," I said.

"I know what you're saying," she said. "The irony is very clear."

We sat on the floor of her quarters for a moment, recovering.

The folders were also on the floor. We were somewhat below the level of professional dignity expected from two of the pack's most senior operational staff, but the quarters were private and we were temporarily unemployed, so the floor seemed like reasonable territory.

"Does Kael know," Nina said. "About the enhancements specifically."

"I've been running that calculation," I said. "He was cursed when we did it. Ivory was in the room when we discussed the specifications. She would have been in a position to tell him later."

"Ivory," Nina said.

"Yes."

"Ivory," Nina said again, "who has spent the past eight months watching Aria navigate this pack."

"Yes," I said.

"Ivory, who documents everything, who cross-references everything, who maintains a filing system that is frankly intimidating."

"Yes," I said.

"Do you think Ivory remembered?" Nina said.

I sat with that.

"I think," I said slowly, "that Ivory has been operating under sustained crisis conditions for eight months. I think her primary focus has been the curse, and her amnesia and the bloodline, and Aria's training, and the network hunting her, and approximately sixteen of the seventeen crises we already listed."

"I think Ivory remembered at some point," Nina said.

"Imagine," Nina said.

I looked at her.

"Just imagine, I said this before but come on, let's look at this" she said, and her voice was doing the sound more. "Another pack asks. How did your Luna die? And we have to explain it."

"She didn't die," I said.

"In this hypothetical she died," Nina said. "How did she die? Well, you see, eight months ago our Alpha's mate arrived and we didn't fully trust her because of a complicated set of circumstances involving the previous Luna's choices and our collective defensive instincts developed over three years of crisis, and we never briefed her on the bunker, and then we got into a fight with the elder council and our Alpha threatened to walk out and we all followed him in a moment of collective action, and while all of that was happening our Luna was in the pack grounds with no idea that the defensive infrastructure we'd built specifically to handle moon-adjacent power was directly below her feet and fully active and calibrated to respond to exactly what she was."

She stopped.

"And Kael," I said, because I saw where this was going and was already doing the calculation.

"Kael," Nina said, and the laugh was getting worse, "left Aria at the pack to protect her."