The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate

Gavriel: Did Dex ever tell you about the time he got caught talking to his own reflection in the armory?

Serena: That didn’t happen.

The knot in her chest loosened by one degree.

Gavriel: Full fucking conversation. It was right when he became Commander of the Draken Forces. He was practicing delivering formations and disagreeing with his own suggestions.

Serena: No he wasn’t.

Her heartbeat slowed down, the rhythm aligning with Gavriel’s. He held her tighter and kept talking because talking was what he was good at. Talking while being dragged to the bottom of a frozen lake inside a volcanic crater was, frankly, the most on-brand thing he’d done all day.

Gavriel: He told his reflection it was ’thinking too small.’ I watched it happen for four minutes before he noticed me. He was pissed. Best four minutes of my life.

Gavriel: My arm is right here and it’s staying here, and if this lake wants you it’s going to have to take both of us, and I’m very annoying to digest.

Serena: I appreciate the commitment. I question the phrasing.

Gavriel: I’m hard to swallow then.

Serena: ....

Gavriel: And, for the record, the green magic seems to be working. I have no idea how. I’m choosing to be grateful and ask questions later. You should try it. It’s very freeing. I recommend it to all mages and control freaks.

She would have laughed if she wasn’t holding her breath. He felt it through the matebond, the laugh forming and then being caught before it could escape, because laughing underwater was a terrible idea and she knew it and he knew it and the fact that he’d gotten her that close to laughing a hundred feet underwater was either a testament to their connection or evidence that they were both profoundly unhinged.

Probably both.

The green light pulsed around them, strained and flickering at the edges but holding, pushing back against the dark.

Finally, the bottom appeared.

Faint. Shadowed. A floor of black stone materializing beneath them like a secret the lake had been keeping, rising out of the dark with the slow reveal of something that had been waiting at the bottom of this water for a very, very long time.

The arrow was embedded in the lakebed like a gold spike driven into the floor of the world. The light from it spilled outwards in a steady radius, illuminating what it had been aimed at all along.

A tall, golden dragon statue, carved with the kind of detail that made it almost look real. The rope had delivered them directly to its feet and dissolved, its job finished, leaving them standing on the bottom of a frozen lake before a monument that had been waiting in the dark longer than any kingdom above it had existed.

Serena swam upward, towards its head. Her white hair floated around her like pale silk, lifted by the water, catching the green.

Gavriel was right behind her, eyes scanning on alert.

This was too quiet.

Her hand rose, fingers outstretched, reaching for the dragon’s carved head.

Then something moved in the dark behind her.

Gavriel felt the displacement of pressure in the water before he saw it.

A black tentacle, thick as a tree trunk and covered in spikes that looked like they’d been designed by something that hated everything, shot from the darkness and wrapped around Serena’s leg with a force that could’ve crushed stone.

She screamed. Not ideal underwater. Bubbles exploded from her mouth in a violent burst, the sound swallowed instantly by the water, and she was yanked backward so hard her hand missed the dragon’s head by a finger’s width.

The tentacle dragged her into the dark with the casual brutality of a predator that had been sitting at the bottom of this lake for centuries and had finally found a meal stupid enough to come to it.

Gavriel’s eyes flashed brighter green than they had all day.

A sword formed in his hand.

It materialized the same way Serena’s fabrications materialized, from thought to object in under a second, except this was green flame compressed into a blade shape, Fae magic forged into something sharp and burning and very, very angry.

He didn’t question it as he torpedoed after her with a ferocity that turned the water into a wake behind him. As soon as he closed the distance, he swung.

The blade tore through the tentacle like it was made of wet paper. The creature recoiled into the shadows with a loud shriek that traveled through the water as a deep, grinding vibration, the sound of something enormous and ancient and pissed off retreating to reassess its life choices.

Gavriel pulled Serena against his chest and was already swimming back towards the statue before the severed tentacle finished thrashing. It writhed behind them for three more seconds, then dissolved into black silt that clouded the water and vanished like it had never been solid at all.

He felt the moment it dissolved, felt the dark magic signature wink out of existence through his Fae senses even though he wasn’t looking.

He also felt the pain in her leg like it was his own, the matebond delivering the sensation with the efficiency of a system designed to make sure her suffering was always a shared experience.

A spike was embedded in her calf. Small, black, pulsing with dark magic he could taste in the back of his throat like copper and rot. The kind of dark magic that didn’t just wound, it anchored, and the anchor was broadcasting her location to whatever was attached to the rest of those tentacles.

Serena grabbed the arm he was using to hold her, her grip tight, her fingers locking around his forearm with the desperation of a woman who could feel the thing in the dark behind them deciding whether it was finished with round one.

Even with his green light spreading through the water, the lake beyond their radius was pitched black, and they were glowing beacons in a sea of nothing, which was simultaneously the only thing keeping them alive and the only thing making them visible.

Gavriel: New rule. No more lakes. Ever. I don’t care if the ancestors send a golden carpet and a written invitation. No. More. Lakes.

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