The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate

Velkaris’s fire hit her like swallowing the sun.

It poured through their connection with zero subtlety, a volcanic river of heat that flooded every vein and set her Hidden Flame mark blazing so bright it lit the entire street gold. Her insides burned. Her blood burned. The backs of her teeth burned. Every cell in her body screamed in a language that roughly translated to too much, too fast, too hot, and Velkaris didn’t care because Velkaris had never once in his ancient life cared about comfortable.

He huffed at her, which in dragon translated to, You don’t need to be a flame master, dummy. Just melt the locks.

Serena blinked. Blood was already pooling in the corners of her vision from the strain.

"Oh," she whispered. "Right."

She didn’t need to control the flame. She didn’t need to fabricate around his entire body, didn’t need to wrap him in the gold cocoon she normally built to keep people safe from the heat. She just needed to melt two iron locks and keep the molten metal from touching him. That was it. That was a task she could have done in her sleep three days ago.

Three days ago she hadn’t been held together by bandages and stubbornness.

She grabbed the locks.

Focused.

Every ounce of concentration she had left narrowed to a single point: the iron under her palms. Heat, but controlled. Controlled, but enough. Enough, but not too much. The flame wanted to pour out of her like a dam breaking and she held it to a trickle, feeding just enough into the metal to make it glow, then soften, then weep.

A blood vessel burst in her left eye. She felt it pop, a tiny wet detonation behind the socket, and her vision on that side flooded red. Blood ran from her nose in a thin, steady line over her lips, tasting like copper and overexertion.

The locks glowed white.

She held. Her hands were shaking so violently the chains rattled, and the flame kept trying to surge, kept trying to become the inferno Velkaris had given her permission to be, and she kept choking it back because the man on the other side of these bars had already been through enough without her melting his wrists off.

The locks dripped. Then sagged. Then gave.

The chains hit the stone floor with a sound like a period at the end of a very long sentence.

The locks collapsed into molten slag and the chains slithered off his wrists like dead snakes.

Charlie slumped forward. She caught him, barely, his full weight hitting her like a sack of grain dropped from a shelf, and her ribs detonated so violently she saw white. He was heavier than he looked for a man with no meat left on him, or she was weaker than she thought, or both. Probably both.

"Charlie." She hooked his arm over her shoulder and hauled. "Charlie, stay with me."

His head lolled against her neck. His eyes were open but seeing nothing, two dim lanterns running out of oil, and the sound he made wasn’t a word. It was air leaving a body that had forgotten why it was supposed to stay.

She dragged him.

Every step was a negotiation between her legs and her ribs, and her ribs were losing. His feet scraped the cobblestones behind her, dead weight she refused to drop, and the blood from her nose dripped onto his shoulder and mixed with the grime already caked there.

Velkaris lowered himself as far as his body would allow, pressing his belly to the street, one wing extended like a ramp. His golden eyes tracked the movement behind her with the calm, calculating patience of a predator counting threats.

"Up." She was talking to herself as much as to Charlie. She shoved him toward Velkaris’s shoulder, got his torso across the scales, and pushed. Her arms screamed. Her vision swam. She climbed up after him, hooking one leg over and pulling his limp body against her chest, wrapping both arms around him because there was nothing else to hold him in place.

The first arrow hit the cobblestones three feet from Velkaris’s tail.

The second one bounced off his scales and he didn’t flinch.

The guards poured around the corner in formation. Dozens of them. Half had already shifted, wolves and something she didn’t get a good look at because Velkaris decided he’d seen enough.

He launched.

The force of it nearly ripped Charlie from her arms. She locked her grip, fingers white-knuckled in Velkaris’s scales on one side and fisted into the remnants of Charlie’s shirt on the other. Arrows whistled past them, one close enough that she felt the wind of it graze her ear.

They cleared the walls by inches. Something clanged off Velkaris’s underbelly, a ballista bolt or a very ambitious spear, and he roared back at the kingdom with enough force to rattle the windows of every building in the slave quarter.

Then they were above the tree line. Then above the clouds. Then gone.

Serena couldn’t let go.

Her arms were locked around Charlie’s chest and she could feel his heartbeat against her forearm. It was faint. Irregular. The kind of rhythm that belonged to a body deciding whether it still wanted to participate. His skin was cold despite Velkaris’s heat, which was wrong, which was terrifying, because a body that couldn’t absorb warmth was a body that was shutting down.

This man had saved her life. More than once. He carried her off cobblestones when her back was raw and her blood was soaking through his clothes. He helped her and Elara escape when helping meant risking everything he had left, which wasn’t much, and he risked it anyway because that was who Charlie Thorne was.

Elara and her had spent over four years with this man and in that time, he turned into family.

She pressed her forehead against the back of his neck. His pulse fluttered under her arm like a moth trapped under glass.

"Don’t you dare," she whispered. The wind stole the words, but she said them anyway. "You don’t get to die on me. You don’t get to save my life and then die before I can return the favor."

His heartbeat stuttered. Continued. Barely.

Her body was screaming. Her ribs felt like they’d been reassembled by someone who’d lost the instructions. Her left eye was still flooded red from the burst vessel, her nose had stopped bleeding only because her body had run out of things to spare, and every muscle from her shoulders to her hips was shaking with the effort of holding a grown man against a dragon at altitude.

She held him tighter.

Because letting go was not an option she was willing to discuss with her body, her ribs, or gravity.

That’s when Velkaris’s eyes flared gold.

Both of them. At the same time. Two molten spotlights cutting through the dark like beacons, bright enough to cast shadows across the clouds beneath them, bright enough that the glow reflected off Charlie’s ashen face and made him look like a corpse dipped in honey.

Serena barely registered it. Her arms were full of dying man and her body was full of pain and her brain had deprioritized everything that wasn’t keeping Charlie’s chest rising and falling against her forearm.

But somewhere beneath her, Velkaris was grumbling.

Low. Resonant. A vibration that started in his chest and rolled through his entire body like thunder trapped underground. It wasn’t directed at her. It wasn’t directed at Charlie. It wasn’t the irritated huff he gave when he was annoyed or the territorial rumble he used when something got too close. This was different. This was a conversation.

He was talking to someone. Or something. Or to a frequency she couldn’t hear and a language she didn’t speak, his massive jaw working in micro-movements.

The grumbling shifted in pitch and cadence like a creature exchanging information with something only he could reach.

She was too exhausted to question it.

Six silhouettes cut across the moon.

She almost missed them. Her left eye was useless, flooded red from the burst vessel, and her right was blurring at the edges the way vision blurs when the body is preparing to shut down whether the brain agrees or not. The world was doubling, tripling, the stars smearing into streaks of light that looked like scratches on glass.

But the moon was big enough and the silhouettes were dark enough and six dragons flying in formation against a white disc in the sky were impossible to miss, even for a woman running on blood and willpower.

Six. Wings spread wide. Moving toward them with the kind of synchronized precision that said military, not wild.

She blinked. The blink took too long. The kind of blink that lasted three seconds instead of one, the kind where the eyelids went down and the brain whispered stay and the body almost listened.

She forced her eyes open.

The dragons were closer.

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