Chapter 656
ARIA
Finished
The bond architecture – the actual structure of it, the Kael and Ivory memories and the twelve years and the integration and the children’s names and the duel and the den – was still there.
Everything that had been built.
Still there.
Just without the thing that had been trying to use it.
I came back.
Kael was on the ground.
He’d collapsed – not from an attack, the specific collapse of someone whose body had been running on something that had just been removed. The wolf and the person reconnecting without the root’s interference, the integration completing the final step it had been building toward.
Unconscious.
Breathing.
Present in the link in the specific way he was present when the integration was fully active rather t running in the split state the root had been producing.
I was on the ground.
I was bleeding from several places.
The cost of the extraction
1
not death, Silver had been right about that, but not nothing. The power reserves were depleted in the way they’d be depleted after the border battle, after the sustained shield work, after everything used at once in a sustained effort.
I was very tired.
Nina appeared.
She had been somewhere in the estate and she appeared at the edge of my vision with Jordan behind her and the specific quality of people who’d felt the root leave the link and had moved toward it.
She saw Kacl.
She crossed to him.
Put her hand on his face.
Her hand was shaking.
12:07 pm
Chapter 656
Finished
Not dramatically. The specific small shaking of someone who’d been holding something for too long and had arrived at the end of the holding.
—
“He’s breathing,” Jordan said, behind her. He was holding something the case, the specific sealed case. with Cassium’s seal on the front, the document they’d been sent for, the thing that was going to neutralize the Convention challenge and protect the pack from the legal exposure.
The document.
They’d gotten it.
The thing that was going to prove what Cassium had done. The thing that was going to give Ivory’s arrangement of the bond a legal counterweight. The thing that was going to end the Convention challenge and protect Shadowmere.
Nina looked at the document in Jordan’s hands.
She looked at Kael unconscious on the floor.
She looked at the empty space in the room – the space that should have been occupied by the person who’d arranged all of this, who’d built the plan and the healer network and the compound documentation and the backup verification word and the forty pages of notes and the cure and the car and the specific. extraordinary everything that was Ivory.
The space that was empty.
“We got it,” Jordan said, and his voice had the specific quality of something that was technically a victory and was completely hollow. “We got the document. The plan worked. The Convention challenge-”
He stopped.
Nina’s face.
The thing that happened to Nina’s face when she looked at the empty space and the document and Kael on the floor and understood the specific weight of the accounting – we had the document, we had the root removed, we had everything we’d come for.
And Ivory was gone.
Not present.
Not somewhere nearby* or just outside or in the other room”.
Gone.
Hale had taken her when he teleported. Her body- they’d said her body, the healer had said she wasn’t breathing had been taken somewhere that was not here, that was not findable with the current information we had, that was outside the reach of everything we’d built and prepared and executed tonight.
Nina broke.
12:07 pm
Chapter 656
Not the quiet version
the actual version.
Finished
The sound that came from Nina was the specific sound of someone who’d been the last person standing through everything and had arrived at the thing they couldn’t stand through.
She broke.
Completely.
And I sat on the floor of Cassium’s clinic, bleeding and exhausted, and watched Jordan go to her — the specific immediate going-to of someone who’d been beside this person through thirty years and was beside her now – and hold her through the sound.
The document was on the floor.
Sealed.
With Cassium’s seal.
Proof of everything.
Proof that would protect Shadowmere.
Proof that was worth nothing right now.
Silver said, very quietly: *Gone and dead are not the same thing.*
*I know,* I said.
*Hale took her,* she said. *When he teleported. He took her.*
*Yes,* I said.
*He took her instead of leaving her,* Silver said. He took her specifically.*
*Yes, I said.
*If she were dead,* Silver said, “he would have left her. She would have been leverage, dead – he would have left her where Kael would find her.*
I sat with this.
*He took her,* Silver said. *Which means she was something to him. Not just a body.*
*You don’t know that,” I said.
“No,” Silver said. “But I know that Ivory built contingencies. She built for unavailability, not for absence. She built for being gone, not for being dead. A pause. And gone and dead are not the same thing.”
The sound Nina was making.
Jordan’s voice, low and continuous, the specific register of someone who was present for someone else and
they had.
12:07 pm
Chapter 656
Kael, breathing, on the floor.
The document, sealed, on the floor beside it.
Finished
a/n: the book will be wrapped up in a few chapter, maybe one or two. Book 2 comes out this month ending, Aria’s story in the aftermath, no Nory, no Nina, No Jordan, No Elite. No inner circle propaganda.
Bock 2 title: Rebirth of the Moon Hybrid Ice Queen/ Mated to The Energy Alpha.
also will be updating the other books, Not my Luna, Amnesia CEO, secret billionaire heiress, Tamed wife, so please if any catches your fancy. I also write under the penname Audrey C Leilani. search it on google and my books pops out.
Also Hikikimori said i should let you know that she has seen all the readers who commented and her book has been updated to 85, that the last upload was 44, so those interested, please check it out.
It was a pleasure going on this journe, although i did not like the hate ivory got, so all is well that ends well. This also looks like a good place to end the book, so incase i don’t update and start book 2, just keep an eye, if i do get the book online, i will inform you all in my other books. Also there is this book on this app: Rebirth of the broken Luna, it was stopped at 180 chapters, the book is mine, i lost the account and could not recover it y’all check it out, if it feels like what you want to read, tell me so i can put it up here, as always comment and i will reply,