Chapter 353

KAEL

I didn’t tell you because you would have said no. You would have said you weren’t willing to solve the problem at that cost, forcing a bond to a stranger just to survive and you would have been wrong but you

would have been certain and I know how you are when you’re certain. You would have let the curse progress rather than let me give something up that you felt you had no right to ask me to give up. You would have insisted on dying loving me, and although it sounds very romantic in the novel i do read in my spare time, the thought of you dying, me growing up without you was more frightening than the thought of you being mated to someone else.

*So I didn’t ask. I decided. I did it.*

*I want you to know the full thing, and I want you to know before Sera can use it as a weapon against either of us, because things used as weapons are less effective when the people they’re aimed at already know they’re coming.*

I also want you to know that I don’t regret it. I’ve thought about this carefully since I got my memories back, since I had the full picture again, after my outburst at Aria after that hunt, it was a memory that came after lashing out, and i had finally been given context of what i had done and I don’t regret the decision. You’re alive. You’re yourself. Shadowmere has its Alpha. Whatever it cost me – it was worth it. That’s not self-erasure, it’s not martyrdom. It’s just the honest accounting.*

*The last thing I want to say is this: whatever you decide to do with this information, whatever you feel about it, I need you to not make it about owing me something. I didn’t do it to build a debt. I did it because it was right and because I could and because watching you disappear piece by piece was something I couldn’t continue doing.*

*I’m not giving this to you as a reason. I’m giving it to you because you deserve to know the full picture. What you do with the full picture is yours to decide.* 1

*

–

Ivory*

I folded the letter back into its original form with the care of handling something that mattered to me and gently set it on the desk. Looked at it for a moment.

Then I picked up my comm and called Jordan.

“My office,” I said. “Ten minutes.”

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Chapter 353

Tee Coins

“Something happened?” Jordan said, with the alert quality that appeared in his voice when the hour and the tone of a call suggested something outside normal parameters.

“Something happened eight months ago,” I said. “I just found out about it.”

Jordan read the letter standing up, which was how he read everything he was processing seriously he’d told me once that sitting down while reading made him feel like the information was coming to him rather than him going to it, and I’d never fully understood that but had observed it enough to know it was true.

He stood in the middle of my office and read all three pages without pausing, without asking questions, and then stood there for a moment after he’d finished with the expression of someone organizing multiple simultaneous conclusions.

“She arranged it,” he said. Not a question. Confirming.

“She arranged it,” I said.

“Before Aria came here. Before any of it.” He set the letter down on the desk with more care than was strictly necessary for a piece of paper. “She identified the bloodline. Wrote to than was strictly necessary

Blackwood’s pack. Got Aria proposed as the candidate.” He paused. “Got Aria out of Damon’s orbit at the same time.”

“Two problems, one solution,” I said. “Which is very Ivory.”

Jordan was quiet for a moment. “How are you feeling about this.”

“I’m working through it,” I said, which was honest.

“You’re not going to tell me you’re fine,” he said, which was less a question than an observation. of something he’d noticed was absent.

“I’m not fine,” I said. “I’m not devastated. I’m somewhere in the middle where it’s complicated and I need to think it through before I know what I actually feel rather than what I feel right now in the immediate aftermath.”

Jordan nodded. He understood the distinction

—

had been on the receiving end of it from me often enough to know that I needed the processing time.

“Sera has the letter,” I said. “Or a copy. She produced it during the clinic consultation, apparently as leverage against Ivory. Ivory believes Sera’s goal is to use it to complicate the situation – to create conflict between me and Ivory by revealing that Ivory went behind my back, to destabilize whatever relationship exists between me and Aria by introducing the information that the bond was arranged out of necessity, instead of it being pure luck that Aria was chosen, which immediately changes the context of the bond between me and aria and

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everyone is going to switch on us, because we manipulated a bond, disregarding everything

else.

“All of which she could use to make Damon look more sympathetic,” Jordan said, following the logic with the speed he brought to intelligence assessment.

“If he can point to Ivory as the person who engineered Aria’s removal from his pack, if he can frame it as a manipulation that Aria was a victim of-”

“He becomes someone trying to recover what was taken from him rather than someone who rejected Aria and then became our enemy,” I said. “Yes.”

“It’s a good weapon,” Jordan said, with the specific reluctant respect of someone who found the strategy of an enemy impressive while objecting to it.

“She came here knowing she couldn’t fight her way through your defenses or Nina’s

documentation or tho

open door policy outcome. So she went for the fracture points instead.”

“She went for the thing that could make us fight each other instead of staying focused on her,” I said. “Yes.”