The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate

Welcome to Lake Fun!

There are a ton of aquatic activities for the whole family including: couples ice-breaking (bring your own sword), synchronized swimming (combat formation), freestyle tentacle removal, shark meet-and-greet, and more!

Let’s check in with our three enthusiastic swimmers who signed up for the all-inclusive package.

Fin pulled Serena against his chest and kicked hard towards the surface with his arm locked around her tight enough to bruise.

Gavriel fell in behind them, blade drawn, swimming backward with his eyes on the dark. Rear guard. The position that faced the threat so the person carrying the wounded didn’t have to. He’d chosen it without second thought because Fin was not injured and faster. If anyone was going to make it out of this, it was going to be him.

Tiberon surged ahead, taking point, his green sword raised and his eyes scanning the water with the systematic sweep of a commander who had never once missed a threat.

Tiberon Drakenfell did not adjust for circumstances. Circumstances adjusted for Tiberon Drakenfell.

A mutated shark exploded from the dark on their left flank. It shot towards Fin and Serena like a spear, homing on the blood in the water, closing the distance with the mindless velocity of a predator that had locked its target and abandoned every other consideration.

Tiberon intercepted. His green sword arced in one powerful, practiced strike, the same swing he’d used to kill men and monsters on land translated to water without losing a single degree of lethality.

The creature’s head separated cleanly from its body. It dissolved into black silt as the corpse sank, no gore, no blood, just dark magic unmaking itself the moment the host form was destroyed. The silt dispersed into the water and vanished as if it had never been solid.

The lake’s customer service was relentless. Every time they handled one problem, management sent another.

A tentacle rocketed up from below.

Gavriel slashed it before it reached Fin’s kicking legs, the green blade cutting through the spiked limb in a single downward stroke that sent a shockwave rippling through the water. The severed piece thrashed once and dissolved into black silt.

Another tentacle. Gavriel cut it.

At this point, cutting tentacles was less combat and more landscaping and it was going to run out of appendages eventually.

Mr. Shark Junior came next, smaller and faster. Tiberon slashed it. The kill registered on his face the way a sneeze registers on a mountain. It happened. The mountain continued.

Serena’s body fell limp against Fin’s chest. The limpness was the terrifying kind, the kind that came from a body that had stopped negotiating with consciousness and started drafting a resignation letter.

Tiberon cleared the path in front of them while Gavriel killed everything behind them. They were a machine. Three wolves moving as a single unit, each covering the angles the others couldn’t, each trusting the others to hold their sector in a wordless combat synchronization.

The surface was getting closer. So was Gavriel’s expiration date. He chose to focus on the first fact and ignore the second.

Finally, it appeared above them in a sheet of white. Good news: there was air above it. Bad news: the surface was ice. Because this lake believed in layered difficulty and was not going to let them win without a final boss.

It reflected the green glow from Gavriel’s magic like a lid on a coffin that had zero intention of opening from the inside. But it had not received the memo that three very motivated men were underneath it and was about to be updated in real-time.

Tiberon didn’t hesitate. His arm extended and green flame erupted from his palm, channeled straight through the Hidden Flame mark that was still burning hot, borrowed fire from a woman who was unconscious and still goddamn protecting them.

The flame hit the ice and carved through it like a blowtorch through wax, steam billowing downward in thick white clouds that turned the water around them into a fog bank.

Fin was beside him in a flash, Serena pinned against his chest with one arm, and driving his green sword upward with the other. The blade punched through the weakened ice with a crack that splintered outward in jagged veins, chunks of frozen surface breaking loose and sinking past them in slow, tumbling fragments.

Three wolves broke the surface in an explosive, ragged gasp that echoed across the crater like a gunshot.

Gavriel came up last, sucking air so hard his ribs nearly inverted, blood from his reopened chest wound blooming across the water’s surface in a slick that caught the sunlight and turned it pink. His lungs burned. His vision doubled. Every muscle below his neck was filing a class-action lawsuit against his central nervous system.

His green magic didn’t ask permission.

A platform solidified beneath them on the ice, emerald energy spreading outward from his body and hardening into a surface wide enough for all four of them, stable and flat and glowing faintly, fabricated by magic that was running on instinct. The green was doing a better job than Gavriel’s conscious mind had been doing all evening, which was simultaneously reassuring and deeply insulting.

Fin hauled Serena onto it first. Tiberon climbed up behind him, water streaming from his armor, sword still raised, eyes still scanning the dark water below with the systematic vigilance of a man who had survived too many ambushes to ever assume the fight was finished.

Tiberon Drakenfell did not have an off switch. Tiberon Drakenfell WAS the damn off switch.

They had her. But the nightmare was far from over. Having her was step one. Keeping her alive was step two. Steps three through forty-seven were still loading.

"Ice or not, it’ll grab us if we stay near the water," Fin panted, remembering the last lake they were in.

A green bridge formed from the platform to the rocky shore at that exact moment, wide enough for two men to sprint across side by side. Just the usual run-of-the-mill autopilot fae magic. Bridges, platforms, whatever the situation needed.

Neither Alpha batted an eye, which said everything about how far past surprise they’d traveled in the last ten minutes.

The bar for surprise had been raised to a height that required oxygen and a permit.

But both were thinking the same incorrect thing:

Serena’s magic is green now.

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