The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate

Dexmon’s eyes snapped open.

His body had been running threat detection in his sleep, his awareness returning with the violent immediacy of a soldier waking up in a combat zone. He blinked. Once. Twice. Reorienting. Processing the room, the light, the man standing over the bed.

"She hasn’t woken up yet," Elara answered as she walked past him into the bathing chamber. She returned with a damp cloth, and placed it across Serena’s forehead.

"And no one thought to notify me," Fin snapped.

The sentence hit the room like a slap and Fin heard it leave his mouth and knew, immediately, that it was the wrong goddamn thing to say. His anger had been aimed at his mate and was now pivoting, fast, towards every person who had been in this room while he was across the continent assuming she was avoiding him when she was actually fighting a fever.

Dexmon looked up at him.

"No, I’m sorry Finnick. We’ve been in here and I should have sent word."

The apology was Dexmon at his most stripped. No cocky deflection. No Dexmon-brand smirk deployed to defuse a situation. No clever architecture around the vulnerability. Just the raw materials of a man who knew he’d missed something and wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

The words were genuine. The genuine took the wind out of every sail Fin had been trying to fly because he had walked into this room loaded for war. And his anger, which had been searching for a target with the desperation of a heat-seeking missile in an empty sky, found nothing to lock onto. The missile circled. Scanned. Found nothing. Ran out of fuel. Landed in his stomach as nausea, which was the final destination of anger that had nowhere to go.

He’d spent a full day running a first-class fuckwit festival inside his own head, every assumption wrong, every conclusion backwards, every minute wasted on bullshit blame that should have been spent beside her bed.

She was unconscious. Dexmon was wrecked. Gavriel looked half-dead in the chair. Nobody in this room had been avoiding anything or ghosting. Nobody had been shitty except for the ass who’d spent the entire day building a case against his unconscious mate.

He had been too busy being furious about another matebond to remember that the woman attached to it had been drowning in a lake. She had stopped breathing. He had done compressions on her chest and willed her heart to restart and then he had carried her home and left without looking back.

That was one hundred percent on him. Nobody else.

Gavriel blinked awake. His eyes opened slow, groggy, the unfocused squint of a man returning to consciousness from a depth that suggested he had been asleep for several hours and his body had needed every second of them. He straightened in the chair, winced at his wraps, and his body surged green.

The green was involuntary. It erupted from his skin like a reflex, emerald light washing across the room, and surrounded Serena’s body.

Fin and Dexmon both watched it happen. The green wrapping around her. The gold responding. The two colors pulsing together in a rhythm that looked less like magic and more like breathing, like the green was doing something to her reserves that human medicine couldn’t reach.

But Fin wasn’t mad about it. If Gavriel’s magic was the thing standing between Serena and worse, then Fin’s jealousy could shut the hell up, sit the hell down, and wait its turn, because jealousy wasn’t keeping her breathing and the green was.

The anger from the volcano, the fury that had detonated when he felt Gavriel’s magic touch Serena’s in the ancestor chamber, the territorial rage that had turned the matebond into a firestorm, all of it was still present. It lived in his chest like embers in a banked fire. But right now, with her lips blue and her fever climbing and her body fighting something that was winning, Fin’s priorities had been reorganized by a force stronger than jealousy.

If that green was keeping her alive, the Gamma could knock his socks off.

Fin sat on the edge of the bed. His hand found her arm. The skin was hot, damp, and the contact sent a shock of information through their matebond that made his jaw tighten.

She was depleted. Beyond depleted. Whatever reserves she had left were being consumed by her body’s attempt to fight the fever and the fighting was losing.

The door opened.

Alaric entered first, Hyran and Tiberon behind him. Three men walking with the coordinated urgency of a medical team and a king whose timing suggested they had been monitoring the situation and had arrived because the situation had changed.

Fin looked up. "Why isn’t she waking?"

Alaric surveyed the room, determined that every person in it was either injured, glowing, or about to make his job harder, and answered accordingly.

"Three problems. Her body is fighting a combination of magical depletion, dark magic contamination from the spikes we extracted, and what appears to be acute tether-aggravation that accelerated while her defenses were down." He tipped his chin at Dexmon and Gavriel. "The depletion is being addressed by whatever these two have been doing."

Dexmon’s body flared gold, right on cue, adding to the green surrounding Serena. His chest puffed out a full inch while his face tried to play it cool. Tried. Failed. He was entirely too proud of himself.

Xeon: He is a peacock.

Fin: I see that.

Xeon: They both are. The green one too.

Fin glanced at Gavriel, who was managing to hide his self-congratulation only marginally better than Dexmon.

"She was not cleared for the mission to begin with and I was overruled, which happens at an alarming frequency," Alaric continued. "She came back dehydrated because these two geniuses apparently passed out in a hot spring sauna inside a volcano for hours."

"I want it on the record that the hot spring was the least dangerous thing that happened to us on that volcano," Gavriel said. "By a wide margin. The hot spring was the safe part. The hot spring was the victory lap."

"Your victory lap cost you both water volume that neither of you had to lose and is why you both are recovering slowly." Alaric turned back to the room. "Which brings us to the urgent part: I can’t decontaminate a system with nothing to work with. She lost too much blood. And she needs it badly."

The words landed and three mouths opened at the same time with zero hesitation.

"Take mine," Fin said.

"Take mine," Dexmon said.

"Take mine," Gavriel said.

Three vending machines. Same product. Same button. Same response time. The matebond had turned Alpha kings into a blood-dispensing service with identical programming and zero regard for their own inventory levels.

Alaric looked at his patients who were volunteering for a procedure they were medically disqualified from. An administrative headache he had zero patience for.

"This," he snapped, "is exactly why I prefer patients who are unconscious."

"She’s unconscious and she’s your most complicated patient," Elara pointed out.

"She’s unconscious and she’s not arguing with me. That makes her my best patient. The three of you could learn something."

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