All Chapters of MATED TO THE ENEMY: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

They kept talking, or more likely, Elsie spoke, Ferna lectured, but their voices started to drift into background static because a scent cut through the air like a blade.The same scent that has crowded my senses ever since the day of the festival. Citrus. Warm earth. Heat.Aklan.My head snapped up before I could stop myself. I no longer had control over my own body.And there he was.Walking into the cafeteria, like the entire building should rearrange itself around him, broad shoulders, sweat-damp hair, that aura that sucked the oxygen from every room. He looked exhausted, irritated, and unfairly beautiful, and then—His eyes locked onto mine.It wasn’t subtle, wasn’t accidental. It was instant, sharp, like someone grabbing me by the spine.His gaze hit me so hard my breath stuttered in my throat.And I swear, I swear on every god of the nine realms, his chest rose just a little faster when he saw me. Like, he hated that he had been looking for me. Like, he hated that he found me.

The first mistake I made was agreeing to do this here. I sat in Kiyan’s room, surrounded by a fortress of yellowed scrolls and ancient tomes that smelled like dust and forgotten wars. Kiyan’s room always looks like it’s trying too hard to pretend it’s in order. Scrolls stacked in crisp piles. Everything aligned like soldiers waiting for inspection. Everything tidy, everything proper, except the scent in the air that completely ruins the illusion.Beneath the candle smoke and parchment, beneath whatever incense he burns, there’s still that lingering musk of rut and sex clinging to the walls like it knows it belongs here.The air was thick, heavy with the weight of secrets we’d been unearthing for hours, but my mind wasn’t on the parchment anymore. It was on her. Always her, these days. The rune on my chest pulsed faintly with every breath, a constant reminder that my body wasn’t my own anymore, not since the mate bond snapped into place like a trap I’d walked straight into.Kiyan

The hallway was a ghost town at this hour—midnight had come and gone, and the academy slept under a blanket of silence broken only by the distant hoot of an owl. I leaned against the wall, bag slung over one shoulder, filled with essentials: dagger, cloak, a few potions from the black market, and the scroll we’d stolen. My blood hummed with adrenaline, and rut, every shadow feeling like it hid eyes watching me.Kiyan arrived exactly on time, because of course he did. He always moved like someone who expected to be graded for punctuality. Bag packed, expression set in that grim determination I’d seen during battles we weren’t supposed to survive.“This better be worth missing Seraphine’s warmth,” he muttered, handing me one of the flashlights we’d grabbed from storage.“It is,” I said, clicking mine on. The beam cut through the dark. “The Realm of Shadows holds the origins of the Mark. We will go to the halls of dread just outside of Norsen at the banks of the shadow river. The old war

If there was a prize for pretending to pay attention, I’d have won it by now—gold medal, trophy, plaque, maybe even my name engraved on Norsen’s wall of fame. But the universe—or rather, the moon goddess—had other plans, because absolutely nothing the commander was saying about war brokering and territorial accords was sticking to my brain.Not one word.Not even a letter.I was supposed to be learning how to broker peace between warring realms.Instead I was learning how many seconds I could survive before my body betrayed me again.The lecture hall was packed, rows of students hunched over notebooks, the commander at the front droning on about territorial treaties and blood-oath clauses.His voice was a dull hum, like bees trapped behind glass.All I could focus on was the persistent, traitorous buzz happening between my legs, the kind that made my thighs twitch under the desk. I shifted for the eighth time in ten minutes, silently praying my chair wasn’t noticing how much I hated

I was halfway through explaining a flanking maneuver to Dava when everything in my vision narrowed to two approaching figures.The courtyard had been loud a second ago, steel clashing in the training rings, students shouting over one another, Kiyan barking orders and the son of the Narthan minister of foreign affairs, Dava teaching the new drills he had learnt from his time down south during his time there as an exchange student and spy. Kiyan, Dava, and I stood in the shade of the old oak near the training fields, maps spread across a stone bench, debating flanking maneuvers for the upcoming inter-realm exhibition. Dava was sketching formations in the dirt with a stick, Kiyan arguing about supply lines, and I was nodding along like my mind wasn’t a warzone.But the moment I saw them, the noise dulled, like the world had decided to step back and let something important happen.Two girls were walking toward us.One of them looked terrified, her shoulders tight, hands fisted at her sid