Chapter 527
KILLIAN
:
Finished
Ivory was a different category. Ivory talked to me when medical necessity required it and otherwise treated me with the professional courtesy of someone who had complicated feelings about a situation and was managing them by being competent rather than warm. It wasn’t cold. It was extremely controlled.
h was its own kind of signal.
olf had opinions about the signal. My wolf had opinions about Ivory that I tried not to mine too carefully because examining them produced feelings that were easier to leave in category of *not right now* and were significantly harder to process when fully
nowledged.
he was my fated mate.
her walking into a room in the
I’d known it since I was eighteen. The specific moment previous Alpha’s pack house, me seeing her and feeling the pull of it like a physical thing, and then understanding what the pull was and understanding immediately that this was going to be complicated in ways that simple was never going to touch.
She’d been younger. I’d waited. That was the thing I’d done right in the middle of a long list of things I hadn’t done right — I’d felt it and I’d said nothing and I’d waited because she was not yet eighteen and I was eighteen and the bond was new information that I needed to hold until she had the same information to hold.
She’d never gotten it. Her wolf had gone quiet along with everyone else’s in Shadowmere when the mindlink broke. She couldn’t feel the pull. She’d grown into someone who was thoroughly, completely, heartbreakingly in love with Kael – and I’d watched that from the outside too, which was its own specific education in the geography of feeling things you couldn’t fix.
I hadn’t helped the situation by what I’d done afterward. The network, the cooperation, the years of being in a place I shouldn’t have been for reasons I’d been telling myself were about survival and that I was starting to understand had also been about something else – about being connected to the story in some way, even the wrong way, rather than being nowhere.
My wolf circled when I thought about this. The wolf was less patient than the person. The wolf processed the fated mate situation with the simple urgency of an animal that knew what it knew and couldn’t understand why the resolution was taking this long.
“She’s right there,
nicated, in the non-verbal way wolves communicated
internally. She
ime we’re in the same building.*
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*She can’t feel it,* I responded, in the non-verbal way people communicated back. *Her wolf is quiet. She doesn’t know.*
*She knows,* the wolf said. *She’s choosing not to.*
This was possibly accurate. I didn’t know how much of the bond Ivory could feel with her wolf infrastructure functioning at reduced capacity. I didn’t know how much the healer’s knowledge of bloodlines and fated bond mechanics had told her that the direct wolf-sense couldn’t. She’d said herself, in the basement, that the bond told you who the person was but love had to be built.
She I
kne
ku
who I was. That was the most charitable reading of her behavior toward me. She I was to her and she was making specific choices about what to do with that
ees were: treat the injury, maintain professional distance, process everything else at
pace felt survivable.
respect that. I was trying to respect it.
wolf was less respectful.
Wednesday afternoon I went to the botanical garden.
I went because the compound injury needed the specific compound that the garden produced, which Ivory had directed me to collect as part of the ongoing treatment protocol. She’d given me very specific instructions about which plant, which section, how much to take, how to take it. The instructions were clinically precise and contained exactly no personal content.
I’d read the instructions three times because the clinical precision was the closest thing to Ivory talking to me that I had access to, and I was apparently at a place where I was parsing instructions for compound collection as human contact.
My wolf thought this was pathetic.
I thought the wolf was not entirely wrong.
The garden was empty when I arrived. The secondary section had the nightbloom and the silver-leafed compound and the specific plants that Ivory had built into something coherent over years. I knew some of what these plants were – I’d been doing my own research, in the months of the network and before that, trying to understand the bloodline and the curse and all the things that Ivory had been tracking. Our research had overlapped in places. We’d been following the same trail from different directions.
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Chapter 527
I crouched at the relevant plant and took what the instructions said to take.
The vine, in the secondary section, moved.
I looked at it.
Finished
It extended toward me in a way that I recognized because I’d watched Jordan deal with it in the meeting – the companion planting’s response to something it registered as worth registering. Jordan’s warmth. Mine, apparently, was something else.
It retracted.
The compa
My wolf
“Tha
was
ating retracted.
nd that translated roughly to *even the plants don’t like us.*
d, out loud, to a vine. Then stopped, because I was talking to a vine and that as becoming mentally deranged.
ke you,” Ivory’s voice said, from behind me.
st enough that I nearly lost balance. She was at the garden entrance – she’d been ween sections, by the look of it, the healer’s assessment of her plants that she did She had the expression of someone who’d heard me talking to a vine and was to address the substance rather than the form.
brated,” she said. “The companion planting. To certain energy signatures. It responded an because he has a warmth signature it reads as familiar. Your signature is—” she d, “-different.”
erent how,” I said.
oon-adjacent,” she said. “But the wrong direction. Like something that could be warm and n’t quite yet.” She looked at the vine. “It’s not rejecting you. It’s being cautious.”
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Mated To My Mate’s Worst Enemy
Chapter 528
A passionate storyteller who brings emotions to life through her words. When she’s not writing, she finds peace nurturing her garden.