Chapter 554

ARIA

We were in the corridor outside the dungeon.

+5 Pears

Ivory was breathing in the specific way of someone who’d done something that had taken significant force and the force was not entirely physical. Her nose was bleeding – I noticed that before she did, the slow dark line starting under her left nostril – and she was holding herself with the posture of someone who’d been running on will and the will was entering its final stretch.

Kael went to her.

“Are you alright,” he said.

–

He said it quietly. The same way he always said things to her, the register that had no audience in it, that existed only between them. She looked at him and some of the cold thing in her expression — not released, but set aside, the specific setting aside that she did when she was cataloguing the present situation rather than continuing to process the past one.

“I just started a war,” she said.

“I mean,” Kael said, with the tone of a man trying something, “anyone could have done that.”

“Anyone?” Nina said.

Kael looked at Nina.

“Help me out,” he said.

“She killed two people,” Nina said, “out of anger. She decided, in the space of approximately seven minutes, that they no longer deserved to continue living. She did not take the time to consider alternatives. She stabbed Vela in the stomach in the middle of a taunt. You tried to stop her before she went in and she glared back and you took a step backward, A whole Alpha.”

“I was being cautious,” Kael said.

“She’s telling them game on,” Nina said. “She declared war. With a dagger. In a dungeon.”

“I do kill people,” Ivory said, with the quiet flatness of someone stating a professional truth.

“Yes,” Nina said, “but there’s the Ivory version of killing people, which involves significant personal cost and survival by sheer stubborn refusal to die, and then there’s this, which was – you walked in and stabbed hey before she finished the sentence.”

She was going to say something annoying.” Ivory said.

She was going to say something annoying.” Niua confirmed, “and your response to that assessment was a

agger to the stomach”

9:11 am P P P

Chapter 554

She had it coming,” Ivory said.

+5 Pearis

“Everyone who ends up on your bad side has it coming,” Nina said. “That’s consistent. What’s new is the timeline between the provocation and the response.”

“The timeline was-” Ivory started.

“Killian nearly died,” Kael said.

He said it simply. Not an accusation – a statement. Ivory went still.

“Yes,” she said.

“In your clinic,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“While you were there,” he said.

Ivory looked at the wall. The specific look of someone who was doing an accounting and not finding the numbers manageable.

“He’s fine,” Kac! said. “He’s going to be fine. Jordan’s with him.” A pause. “You got it out.”

“I should have found it earlier,” she said. “During the initial examination. When he came through the gate. I should have-”

“It was designed to be undetectabie.” Kael said.

“Designed by people I’ve been fighting for years,” she said. “I should have-”

“Ivory,” he said.

She looked at him.

“He’s fine,” he said. “You got to him in time.”

Something moved in her face. The thing she did when she received care that she hadn’t prepared a response to the slight flicker of something that existed underneath the clinical layer and rarely got above it.

“You had the dagger and everything,” Kael said.

“I always have the dagger,” she said.

“She always has the dagger,” Nina said, to me, in a tone that communicated this was information I should file.

File it Silver said, sincerely.

You’re bleeding, Kael said.

ivory touched her nose. Looked at her fingers.

9:11 am P P

Chapter 554-

+5 Pearls

That’s- she started.

Then she went sideways

Kael caught her before she reached the floor the automatic response of someone who’d been watching for this, who’d been tracking the signs of under everything else, who knew what it looked like when Ivory’s body was finished with what she’d been asking of it. He went down on one knee with her in his arms, her name in his voice with the specific quality it had when the management layer was completely

gone.

“Ivory,” he said.

She was unconscious.

Nina had

ie already out. “Jordan,” she said. “We need you. She’s down.”

The

ery quiet.

ld Ivory with the specific gentleness of someone who’d been holding this person through ears, who knew exactly how to hold her and where the injured arm was and how to carry ing pressure on the places that hurt. The competence of knowing someone’s body rophe.

aiet in my chest.

t too.

Ivory had declared was going to arrive, probably faster than it would have otherwise, probably he specific fury of a network that had just felt two of its members die in the same location within tes of each other. The root was still active. The full moon was two weeks out. There were thirty ves with a dormant channel through me and a pack mindlink that was still broken and a bunker with enses that would activate against me.

And Kael was carrying Ivory toward the clinic with the look on his face that I’d been trying not to name for nonths.

I loved him.

I stood in the dungeon corridor and understood this as a fact, the way you understood facts that arrived ifter you’d already been carrying them for a long time without knowing what to call them. Not the soft carly version, the version that could still be managed and organized into other categories. The actual version. The one that had a weight to it.

loved him and he loved ivory and we were fated mates and neither of those things canceled the other out, and the specific particular complexity of that was something I was going to have to sit with for a long ime before I understood what it meant.

But I knew it.

9:11 am P P p

Chapter 554

+5 Pearls

*You knew before I did,* I said.

*I’m the wolf,” she said. “It’s different for us.*

*Does Kael’s wolf-* I started.

*I…don’t know.*

Her words sat with me asl followed them toward the clinic.

The morning had started with a picnic basket and an oak tree and me lying in the grass three feet from Kael thinking about the window.

It had arrived at the dungeon and Ivory unconscious and a war declared before lunch.

Silver said: “Come on, Luna.*

I followed my pack.

a/n: okay it is me, i do not like aria, but i will try and make her ending a happy one, but i swear, i will write a new book where aria would be the villain. someone mentioned turning this into a series, book 1; aria and kael, book 2; ivory and killian, 3; nina and jordan. 4: elite and someone. 5: jason. What do you guys think? i mean i am thinking about it, but definitely, and you guys will get to see glimpses of aria and kael in the stories, or some stories may predate aria, like ivory and killian, like everything ivory was suffering, i need to write it down, i am so excited, i will start drafting it out, thank you for the inspiration dear.