Chapter 311

Chapter 311

Chapter 311

JASON

Ivory didn’t say anything immediately. Just sat there with her hand on the cover of the top book, her expression doing several things at once that I was trying very hard not to read too closely because reading them felt like intruding on something private.

Then Margo’s hand went back into the bag and came out with a second, smaller stack, and she hesitated for just a moment before setting them on the far side of the table with a different kind of care slightly more careful, somehow, like the books themselves were slightly more delicate or slightly more charged.

I looked at the titles from where I was sitting and registered that they were not botanical texts.

Ivory registered them at approximately the same moment I did.

I watched the color come into her face with a speed that was almost remarkable given how pale she’d been moments earlier. She stared at the stack for a full two seconds in complete silence before reaching out and pulling them toward herself with a movement that was considerably less graceful than her usual self- fast, slightly scrambling, a motion motivated by the urgent need to get those covers facing away from the room.

I had caught enough of two of the titles to have significant questions, which I was going to have the good manners to never ask.

“Margo,” Ivory said, and her voice had taken on a very specific quality of careful composure that was doing a great deal of work. “Thank you for bringing all of this p>

Margo beamed, apparently having noticed nothing. “Alpha Kael also included a note,” she said, producing a folded piece of paper. “Said to make sure you got it with the books p>

Ivory took the note. Held it. Looked at it for a moment with an expression that was complicated in several new directions. Then she unfolded it, read it, and made a sound that I had never heard her make before, A laugh that was immediately suppressed by her free hand clamping tight across her mouth, looking mortified at the content of the note.

“Is everything alright?” Margo asked.

“Everything is fine,” Ivory said, very precisely. “Thank you, Margo. I’ll let you know if I need anything else p>

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Margo said something cheerful about Ivory’s recovery and made her efficient exit, the curtain falling closed behind her.

The healing bay returned to its ambient quiet.

Ivory looked at the note again. Then looked at the stack of decidedly-not-botanical books she’d relocated to the far side of her lap with their covers very firmly facing down. Then she looked at me with an expression that was-

She was trying not to laugh.

Not a polite smile she was actively working against laughing in a way that was clearly a losing battle, her jaw tight and her eyes bright and her whole face doing the complicated work of someone who’d been through significant emotional devastation in the past forty-eight hours and had just been ambushed by something that was genuinely, funny.

“Do you want to tell me what the note says?” I asked.

She made the sound again. “He wrote ” she stopped, pressed her lips together, gathered

herself.

“He wrote that he has now read books three, four, five, and six of the series.” She paused to let that land. “He says his eyes cannot unsee what they’ve seen p>

I looked at the discreetly face-down stack. “The series has six books p>

said, and she was absolutely losing the battle now. “There are seven p>

d books three through six p>

pparently.” Her voice had gone slightly strangled. “He also wrote that before he sent these before now, months ago, back when he was still under his curse- he wrote the note then, during my amnesia period, meaning he was sitting in his office at some point composing written commentary on p>

She stopped. Drew a breath. The laugh finally won, and she bent over, clutching her stomach as she laughed freely, amused by whatever it was.

I waited, watching her, and felt something settle slightly in my chest. Watching her laugh like that, after the emotional turmoil she had been in for the past two days, were something that healed something in my heart.

“He also says,” she continued, recovering by degrees, “that he has included the actual medicinal botanical texts so that I can pretend I’m working very hard if the healers come in p>

2/3

I looked at the two separate stacks on the bedside table. The thick, serious-looking botanical volumes with their professional spines facing appropriately outward and the other stack, resolutely face-down, tucked slightly behind them where the covers wouldn’t be visible from the curtain.

“That’s thoughtful,” I said. “Strategically thoughtful p>

“He was always strategically thoughtful,” Ivory said, and her voice had shifted again the laughter still there but layered now with something older and quieter. She looked at the note in her hands.

I watched her and thought about what she’d said to me earlier about incomplete information, about working with gaps in her own history. About the months she’d spent treating Kael like an alpha leader she respected and wanted to know better, not knowing what she meant to him on a personal level

And here was the evidence of that context: a man who had known, during the months when she hadn’t, that she’d been hunting for botanical texts she’d missed at a trade fair. And then held onto it for months because she had lost her memories and therefore the context of this books.

And then had sent them with her recovery package, because he wanted her to know.

loudly. Not with declarations or grand gestures or the kind of communication that would

nyone in an impossible position. Just this. The botanical books he’d promised. The er books that said *I was listening even then, I kept what you told me, it mattered even hen you didn’t know it mattered.

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