The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate

"BRACE!" Tiberon roared.

CRASH.

The boat slammed into the crater wall with an impact that rattled every bone in Gavriel’s body twice. The sound of a magic boat hitting a cliff at full speed is exactly as unpleasant as it sounds and twice as bad when you’re inside it.

Serena’s engineering was genius. Serena’s passengers were suffering. The two were not mutually exclusive and never had been.

They shot upward along the rock face, the bubble grinding against volcanic stone, sparks of gold trailing beneath them as the rope hauled the vessel higher and higher.

The ascent looked beautiful from the outside. From the inside it felt like being shaken inside a jar by a very angry child who had opinions about physics.

Fin braced his legs wide, Serena locked against his chest, his body absorbing every jolt so hers didn’t have to. His arm hadn’t loosened since she collapsed. His arm was never going to loosen again, as far as his wolf was concerned, and he was in full agreement that the concept of ’putting her down’ had been permanently removed from his vocabulary.

The rope carried them higher. Five hundred feet of vertical ascent compressed into seconds, the golden line reeling them upward until the boat crested the lip of a cave mouth carved into the crater wall and lurched to a grinding halt on solid rock.

Fin stepped out first, boots hitting stone, Serena cradled against him, her face pressed into the crook of his neck. Her breathing was shallow but present, each exhale a warm ghost against his skin that confirmed she was alive.

Gavriel followed, half-stumbling, his hand pressed against the wraps on his chest that had graduated from barely functional to decorative somewhere during the ascent. His legs were assholes for holding, because they’d been threatening to quit for the last hour and had apparently decided that spite was a valid fuel source.

Tiberon exited last.

For one heartbeat, one fraction of a second he would never admit to and no one would ever witness, the King of Drakenfell glanced back at the golden boat resting on the cave’s ledge. At the dome, still shimmering. At the rope, still glowing.

A grin crossed his face. Small. Private. Gone before it fully formed.

"Clever girl," he muttered.

The highest compliment Tiberon Drakenfell had given anyone in a decade.

The moment evaporated. His expression reset to iron. The bow snapped back into firing position, and Tiberon turned to face the lake below, scanning the dark water and the fractured ice with the cold sweep of a commander who had never once assumed a retreat meant the fight was over.

A vampire broke the surface.

Its claws found the volcanic rock and it began to climb, fingers punching into stone with a strength that shouldn’t have belonged to something that looked like a cadaver, ascending toward the cave mouth with the single-minded hunger of a predator that had locked its target and abandoned every instinct except the one that said UP.

Tiberon nocked another arrow

Fired.

Ash.

He stood at the mouth of a cave on a volcano island, firing a bow at dark-magic vampires five hundred feet below like he did this every day like it was no big deal.

"Serena," Fin said softly, pressing a kiss to her hair.

Her lids fluttered. Once. Twice. Her eyes opened, unfocused, searching for something before they found his face.

Then her gaze dropped to her chest. Her hand went to her neck. The token was gone.

"I have it." Fin didn’t put her down. He shifted her weight to one arm and pulled the token from the pocket of his thermal weave with the other. He’d pocketed it after compressions, when her chest had started moving again and his hands had stopped shaking enough to think about things like keeping track of small objects.

She exhaled. Her fingers closed around it, then stopped.

On the cave wall behind Gavriel, carved into the volcanic stone, was a dragon. Emeralds for eyes. Old. Older than anything else in this crater.

Gavriel’s eyes ignited in green fae magic. The glow was involuntary, bright, and aimed at nothing and everything at once.

The words that came out of his mouth were old fae. He was aware he was doing it but not in control

Tiberon and Fin both looked at him.

Serena’s eyes flared pink. She looked at Gavriel, then at the wall, then at the token in her hand. Her gaze shifted to Fin.

Fin understood. No words needed. He could feel possessed Serena’s urgency through the matebond and handed the token to Gavriel.

The green faded from Gavriel’s eyes, settling back to their usual color. But he knew what to do because he had seen this before with Serena.

He crossed to the wall, reached up, and placed the token in the center of the carved dragon’s mouth.

The runes along the stone ignited, one by one, like a wick catching flame. A serpentine dragon unfurled across the wall in glowing lines, its body stretching the full width of the stone, scales and claws and teeth rendered in light that pulsed with a heat they could feel from six feet away.

BOOM.

The sound hit their chests before their ears. Deep, ancient, the kind of sound that doesn’t come from mechanics but from something that has been sealed for a very long time and has opinions about being opened.

The wall split. A seam of light ran floor to ceiling and the stone separated into a doorway that hadn’t existed three seconds ago.

"Inside. Now," Tiberon ordered.

Nobody argued. Fin carried Serena through first. Gavriel followed. Tiberon entered last, his eyes on the cave mouth until the doors took it from him.

The doors slammed shut behind them with a sealing hiss.

The chamber was circular and cavernous, carved from volcanic stone that had been smoothed by hands or magic or both. The air was warm. Still.

At its center stood a pedestal of jagged black rock. On it, a basin made of volcanic stone holding a flame.

The kind of fire that shouldn’t still be burning and was anyway, because whatever lit it had made sure it would outlast the people who left it here.

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