Chapter 513
ARIA
Finished
Another wolf came through it. Smaller than Kael’s wolf but present and fast and moving with the specific direction of something that had a purpose. Ith Kael’s wolf sideways, off Ivory, the two animals crashing into the far clinic wall together.
They fought.
It wasn’t the casual engagement of a challenge – it was the specific fight of an animal trying to protect somethi
new wolf putting itself between Kael’s wolf and the rest of the room with a consistency that needed to know about what the new wolf was doing.
told m
Kil
full wolf form from – when? The injury? The monitoring had him in the secondary clinic. ng, or we’d thought he was resting, and apparently he’d been aware enough of what was come through a window.
Kael, both hands on the wolf’s ears, talking fast and low. Jordan had pushed himself off the s helping hold. The two wolves had separated – Killian’s wolf had Kael’s pinned in the corner, d position keeping the larger wolf still, but it was taking everything Killian had to maintain it, the sible in every line of the wolf’s body.
was moving toward them.
hand was bleeding. Not a small cut — the kind that came from the broken table edge or the broken ss, and she’d been hit at some point in the tumbling and there was blood at her temple, a thin line of it ight against her skin. She was holding the emergency compound in her good hand, and she was not walking with the steady pace of someone who was fine. She was walking with the determined pace of someone who was not fine and was doing it anyway.
She reached the corner.
Killian’s wolf held Kael’s position by what looked like will more than weight.
Ivory jabbed the compound into the wolf’s side.
The sound Kael made was not the wolf’s howl. It was somewhere between and it was wrong in the way that things were wrong when something was being forced, when something was fighting what was happening to it with every resource available and iosing.
The wolf form broke.
Not cleanly. Not the smooth transition I’d seen on the lower slope when the fight was done and the wolf was standing down. This was the compound doing something specific — forcing the shift back, overriding the wolf’s decision to stay in the form, pulling the man to the surface while the wolf fought every inch of
38
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Kael screame-‘
9:53 am P
Chapter 513-
Finished
Nina and Jordan were there the moment he hit the floor, Jordan pulling the jacket he’d apparently grabbed from somewhere and wrapping it around Kael before he’d fully stopped moving. Kael was shaking. The specific full-body shaking of someone whose system had just been forced through something extreme, whose body didn’t know what had happened to it and was trying to process everything simultaneously.
Killian shifted back. He did it the hard way the rogue wolf’s shift, without the mindlink support, the same way I’d seen Andrew do it in the hal before I’d built the link. it cost him. By the time he was human again he was on one knee, and the injury from the network’s compound was worse than it had been, the wound having reopened during the fight.
He went to Ivory immediately.
Not to Kael. Not to assess the room. To Ivory, who had sat down against the wall because her legs had apparently made a decision about what they were and weren’t going to keep supporting.
“What happened,” Killian said.
Ivory was
I was
er lab.
er lab.
n organized with the specific precision of a healer who knew where everything was for reasons that were professional and also deeply personal – the years of work, the heir careful storage, the equipment that had been maintained and updated and used and cific way that someone who’d built something from nothing loved the thing they’d built.
in pieces. Several shelves had come down. Bottles were broken on the floor, their contents ys that were probably going to be clinically interesting later and were currently just loss. The s gone. The wall had new marks in it.
looking at it and not saying anything, and her hand was bleeding, and there was blood at her and she was holding the empty compound injector in her good hand with the grip of someone needed to hold something while she processed what she was seeing.
an was making sounds. Trying, I registered – trying to be the version of Jordan that made things ter, that found the angle that turned something terrible into something survivable. “I’ve seen worse,” he d, which wasn’t true. “The shelving was going to need an update anyway,” he said, which also wasn’t true.
Nina tried too. Something about the structural integrity of the remaining shelving being an opportunity
They were compensating. Both of them. Doing what they did, filling the space that would otherwise be silence with the specific kind of words that said “we’re here, we’re still here, we’re not going to let this be the thing that breaks us.
Ivory was holding back tears.
I could see it. Not the trying-not-to-cry of someone who was embarrassed by the emotion- the specific attempt of someone who’d been holding things back for so long that the mechanism was automatic, who was deployed it now even **
hanism was at its limit and was not going to hold much longer
Her lab Years of
sent by people
like it was made of paper, directed here, aimed here ce would destroy something specific about Ivory
9:53 am P
Chapter 513-
Finisht
“Those moon witches,” she said, and her voice came out low and controlled and furious. “They activated the root. They pushed it – forced it to the surface. Sent him here.”
“Here specifically,” Nina said. She was in security-chief mode now, the compensating set aside, the assessment running.
“Here,” Ivory said. “To us. Aria was here. was here. They used him as a weapon and aimed him at the people who-” she stopped. “They wanted us dead or they wanted him to do something unforgivable. Either outcome served them.”
“How,” Jordan said. “How did they activate it? We’ve been watching for-”
“Full moon,” Ivory said. “The root was always more accessible on the full moon. During the curse years w managed it, we had protocols, we knew the risk windows. Since the curse broke we haven’t-” she stopped again. “We got comfortable. We forgot to be careful about the full moon.”
“That’s
“It’s
said. “Not yours.”
Ivory said. “We stopped watching.”
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A passionate storyteller who brings emotions to life through her words. When she’s not writing, she finds peace nurturing her garden.