Chapter 389
ARIA
Kael was very still for a second.
Then he looked at the stretcher heading up the slope. At Ivory’s back, now moving away from us.
“She sparred with you,” he said. “With a blade. In the dark.”
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“It was an effective teaching method,” I said, with the honesty of someone who fully believed this was true and was prepared to defend it. “I learned more in the last two hours than in three weeks of library texts.”
Jordan appeared beside me from nowhere. He made a sound that was officially a cough and was not a cough.
“Jordan,” Kael said.
“Yes, Alpha,” Jordan said, in the specific voice he used when maintaining composure was requiring active effort.
“Did you know about this training session?”
“I received the report after the bond signal,” Jordan said. “Which was my first awareness of the situation.”
Kael looked at Ivory again.
He looked back at me.
Then he looked at the scratches again.
“She’s going to say she was being thorough,” he said, which was not a question.
“She said it was an effective method,” I confirmed. “She was right. The things I learned tonight aren’t in any of the texts and I’ve been looking for them for weeks.”
Kael breathed out slowly through his nose. The breath of someone doing the math between *the training was necessary* and ‘Ivory sparred with my mate in the dark on a hillside and gave her a blade scratch and a bruise and arriving at a place where both things were true and didn’t resolve each other.
“You got hurt.”
“It was more Ivory than the attacker,” I said.
From the stretcher, immediately: “Training.”
“Training that resulted in scratches and bruising,” Kael said, looking back at Ivory.
“Which is the point of training,” Ivory said.
Jordan made a sound from behind me that he converted immediately into something he could claim had been a cough.
Kael looked at Jordan. Jordan developed a sudden intense interest in the perimeter of the flat ground.
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10:48 am Pppp.
Chapter 389
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Kael looked back at Ivory, who was studying the sky above her with the expression of someone who had found the stars very interesting and was absolutely not avoiding his eyes.
“You,” Kael said, in a voice that contained several things, “trained her. On a hillside. At night. Without telling anyone where you were going.”
“I told her guard,” Ivory said, to the sky.
“Her guard was at the gate,” Kael said.
“Within shouting distance of the gate,” Ivory said.
“Ivory”
“The traps were already in place,” she said. “From the earlier training session. I didn’t have to set anything up. It was efficient use of existing resources.”
“The traps that shot crossbow bolts into an attacker,” Kael said.
“That was a positive outcome,” Ivory said. “The traps served a dual purpose. Very efficient.”
Jordan had given up on the perimeter and had turned to face a direction where his expression was not visible to Kael.
“Did it work?” Kael asked, and his voice had shifted – the controlled frustration becoming something more genuine. He looked at
“The training?” I said. “Yes. More than I expected.”
He held my gaze for a moment. The assessing quality again, but different from the inventory look – the look that was trying to see the full picture rather than just the surface.
“You sent me the image,” he said.
“I tried,” I said. “I didn’t know if it would work. The bond has been-“I stopped, not sure how to finish that sentence without it becoming something larger than the current moment required.
“Strained,” he said. “I know.” He looked at me steadily. “I felt it anyway. The image came through and then-” he paused, “-you said my name. Not just the image. You said my name and it-” another pause, something in his expression that he was deciding whether to show, “-it was clear.”
I thought about what Ivory had said. “Call for Kael, not his wolf. They are not the same.*
“She told me to call for you,” I said. “Specifically you. Not-“I glanced at the space where the black wolf had been.
“Specifically me,” he repeated. Something in his expression shifted.
“She said the wolf would come running and might make things worse before better,” I said. “And that you would think first.”
He turned his head slightly in Ivory’s direction. She was still studying the sky.
“I didn’t say anything untrue,” she said, to the stars.
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Chapter 389
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Nina organized the walk back up the slope with the efficient authority of someone who’d had a long evening and was ending it by getting her patients back inside pack territory with minimum additional incident.
Ivory on the stretcher – which she’d accepted with roughly the same grace as someone being asked to admit defeat in a competition they’d been winning. The guards carrying it with the practiced smoothness of people who’d been told to be careful and had understood that careful had a specific meaning in this context.
Kael walked beside the stretcher. Not touching it – not being managed out of proximity to her the way he might have been in a different configuration of people. Just walking beside it, close enough to be present, doing the quiet check of someone who was still in Alpha mode about the situation.
I walked on the other side of the stretcher with Jordan beside me.
“You actually used the bond,” Jordan said quietly.
“I think so,” I said. “I don’t know if I did it correctly.”
“He came down the slope in approximately ninety seconds,” Jordan said. “From a dead stop in his office. In wolf form, which means he shifted before he left the building.” He glanced at me. “That’s what correctly looks like.”
I thought about that. About Kael in his office going through coalition correspondence, feeling something come through the bond – an image, his name, his actual name specifically- and shifting and running without stopping to put it through any particular amount of analytical process.
The wolf had been fast. The wolf had gone through a power barrier.
Kael had thought first.
He’d thought “run” and the wolf had been the running, and the man had been the direction of it.
“The attacker,” I said to Jordan, quieter. “She said something before she left. About the curse.”