Chapter 575

“Have you met this pack,” Nina said. “On a given evening, the options for what’s happening in a dark corridor are: someone is dying, someone is having feelings about someone dying, or someone is about to do something that will result in dying. We calibrate accordingly.”

“Nobody is dying,” I said.

“Good,” Nina said. She looked between me and Killian with the expression of someone who was going to circle back to the interpretation she’d already formed. “Then what

“Kael told me he loved me,” I said.

Nina’s expression shifted. The warmth recalibrated into something more precise.

“That’s good,” she said, carefully. “Isn’t it.”

“I kept telling him he’d never said it,” I said. “So he said it. And I asked if he meant it. And he said-“I stopped.

“What did he say,” Jordan said.

“He said I’d told him to say it,” I said.

The path was quiet.

Nina and Jordan looked at each other with the rapid silent communication of people who’d been doing this for two decades.

“Kael,” Jordan said, with the specific tone of a man who’d been compiling documentation on someone’s emotional management failures for years and had just received a new entry.

“He really-” Nina started.

“Yes,” I said.

“Wow,” Jordan said.

“He messed that up,” Nina said. She said it with the flatness of accurate assessment rather than condemnation. “That was genuinely bad.”

“I know he didn’t mean it the way it came out,” I said, before they could go further down that path. “I know that. But it’s also not – it’s not the only thing. He’s my fated mate and he’s in love with Ivory and I can see it and I cant even-I stopped. ‘I can’t be angry. That’s the thing. Ivory isn’t doing anything wrong. He isn’t doing anything wrong. There’s just this whole history and this whole love and I walked into the middle of it and I’m supposed to be building something with him but his heart was already somewhere when I

arnved.”

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Nina looked at me.

Then she did something wasn’t expecting.

Finished

She sat down. On the path. Not on a bench – on the ground, the way Kael had sat on the floor of Killian’s room, the way this inner circle apparently processed difficult things when chairs weren’t available.

Jordan sat down beside her.

After a moment, I sat down.

Killian sat down beside me.

Four people on a path in the dark.

“Jordan and I are fated mates,” Nina said.

I looked at her.

“We’ve been together since before the curse,” she said. “Long before. We were together before we knew about the fated bond. The bond came later and we just-it confirmed what was already there.”

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“We don’t show it,” Jordan said. “Especially in the inner circle context. The work is the work.”

“Kael and Ivory don’t know,” Nina said.

I processed this. Looked at Jordan. Back at Nina.

“Why not,” I said.

Nina was quiet for a moment.

“How do you tell them,” she said. “We got the thing they wanted. We got the easy version – together before the curse, together through it, the bond was there and we had and it worked out.” She looked at her hands. “Ivory will be happy for us. I know she will. But she’ll be happy for us from a specific place that has grief in it, because we have what she was supposed to have, and I don’t-” she paused. “I don’t want to put that on her.”

“And Kael,” Jordan said. “He sealed a wall in his own quarters because he couldn’t walk past the door. He’s been-he’s integrating, he’s trying, he’s choosing Aria, we can all see it. But telling him that his security chief and his intelligence lead have what he and Ivory were supposed to have-” he shook his head. “The timing hasn’t been right.”

“They had children’s names,” Nina said, quietly.

“Ten names.” Jordan said. “For ten children. Back when the future was simple and the curse hadn’t happened and Kael was going to be Alpha and Ivory was going to be his Luna and it was going to be–“he stopped. “It was going to be very straightforward and very good.”

And then it wasn’t,” Killian said.

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“And then it wasn’t, Jordan confirmed.

Finished

The nightbloom was luminescent around us, the specific warm light of something that had been built to be beautiful in the dark

Ivory is my fated mate,” Killian safd

The path went quiet in a different way.

Nina turned to look at him very slowly.

“What,” she said.

“Ivory is my fated mate,” Killian said again, with the calm of someone who’d made the decision to say a thing and was seeing it through.

“What,” Jordan said.

Not a question. The specific word that arrived when the brain had received information too large to process in real time.

“She was teld during the captivity,” Killian said. “She knows. I know. Nobody else knows.”

“Does Kael know,” Nina said, her voice doing the careful thing.

“Killian is still alive,” Jordan said. “So no.”

Nina looked at Jordan. Jordan looked at Nina.

“The moon goddess,” Jordan said.

“Yes,” Nina said.

“Fated Ivory to the half-brother,” Jordan said.

“Yes,” Nina said.

“Of the man she’s in love with,” Jordan said.

“Yes,” Nina said.

“While that man is bonded to someone else,” Jordan said.

Jordan,” Nina said.

7

“I’m just he stopped. “I’m just following the architecture. The moon goddess looked at this specific group of people and arranged all of the feelings in the most complicated possible configuration.”

“It appears so,” Killian said.

“Does Ivory-” Jordan started.

“Love me?” Killian said. “No. She knows the bond exists. She can’t feel it – the infrastructure is broken But

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#Finished

she knows. He paused. “She doesn’t love me. She loves Kael. I’m not under any illusion about that.”

Jordan was quiet for a moment. The processing quiet, the one where the intelligence operation was running in real time.

“So Ivory,” he said, “is mated to someone she didn’t choose, can’t have the person she loves, and has been carrying both of those things in addition to four years of assassination attempts and a curse she’s been trying to break while knowing-” he stopped

Something shifted in his expression.

The intelligence operative’s expression. The one that arrived when pieces connected in a direction he hadn’t been looking.

“Jordan,” Nina said.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Jordan,” she said again, with the weight.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s just-she’s been in the lab a lot. Working on the root removal.” He paused. “Alone.”

“She said the compound work is complex,” I said.