The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate

"Natalia."

Two voices. At the same time. In stereo.

Serena’s palms were still on the stone when hands closed around her arms and lifted. She was vertical before her brain caught up, and the body holding her upright was Fin’s, his chest against her back, his arms locked under hers, and the wrongness of it hit her so hard she almost choked.

He told her to get out.

He told her to get the fuck out. Hours ago. In that office. With that voice. And now he was here, holding her up, saying a name that didn’t belong to this lifetime in a tone that didn’t belong to this man.

She pulled free.

"Don’t." It came out ragged. Wrecked. She twisted out of his grip and stumbled back, putting distance between them because if he touched her again she was going to cry, and she could not cry, she had been crying for hours on a dragon and her body had nothing left and if she started again in front of him, on this field, in front of Alaric and Elara and fourteen dragons and whatever ancient dead kings were currently borrowing her mates like library books, she would not stop.

"I can’t do this right now," she managed.

She looked back at them.

They were standing side by side. Dexmon and Finnick. Both with golden eyes. The same gold. Ancient, luminous, wrong gold that had no business being in either of their faces, and they were looking at her with identical expressions of confused concern, like two puppets being operated by the same hand, and the hand was worried about her and the puppets didn’t understand why she was backing away.

They looked like best friends. They looked like they’d been having a lovely chat about her and had arrived at some kind of consensus about her wellbeing and were now baffled that she wasn’t cooperating with the plan.

Serena needed a fucking drink.

She turned toward the portal, took two steps, and the ground betrayed her again. Her legs folded like someone had cut the strings and the field rushed up to meet her face.

Elara caught her. One arm hooked around Serena’s waist, stopping her momentum an inch before she ate dirt.

"Shit," she hissed, already ducking under Serena’s arm and hauling it across her shoulders.

Serena’s ribs ignited. The position pulled at every wound Viremont had reopened and every muscle Velkaris’s fire had burned through, and the pain was so immediate and so complete that her vision whited out for a full second.

A noise escaped her throat that she killed immediately. She dealt with it.

Because being carried was not an option. Being carried meant being helpless and being helpless meant being a girl on cobblestones with a flayed back and she was not that girl anymore. She locked her jaw, put one foot in front of the other, and let Elara take enough weight to keep her vertical.

Behind her, both golden-eyed mates lurched forward in unison three times in under ten seconds. Serena was unaware of this. But Velkaris watched and found it entertaining.

They walked through the portal together.

Alaric’s eyes moved from Charlie to Serena. Back to Charlie. Back to Serena. The calculation was visible, a healer triaging if the underground lake was the right call here.

"No brainer," Serena snapped. "I’m tazing my insides every time I make a portal so someone else will need to open one to the lake."

The tone came out with more bite than she intended. Somewhere between exhausted and venomous, the vocal equivalent of a woman who had been crying for hours, rescued a dying man, been possessed, healed, dropped, caught, and called by a dead woman’s name twice, and was officially crabby.

Elara burst out laughing. The kind that escaped before she could catch it, loud and startled, her hand flying to her mouth a full second too late.

Alaric blinked. Then blinked again. His face did the thing faces do when the brain behind them is processing something it wasn’t built to receive, a brief, visible buffering, like a man who had been handed a document in a language he didn’t speak and was too proud to admit it.

Behind them, both Dexmon and Fin tilted their heads. At the same time. At the same angle. Two possessed Alphas with matching golden eyes performing the same gesture of ancient, synchronized confusion, like a pair of owls that had just watched a mouse do something unexpected.

Then the Dragon King raised one hand and a portal ripped open three feet to his left.

The underground lake shimmered on the other side. The portal was flawless. Stable. Effortless. Like he had done that a thousand times. Made by a man who couldn’t figure out how to turn on and off his gold magic let alone make a goddamn portal with all the strain of someone opening a curtain.

Nobody moved.

Alaric recovered first. Because Alaric always recovered first, because Alaric’s brain had a professional obligation to function regardless of what the rest of the room was doing. His jaw tightened, he pointed at the stretcher, and his healers moved, carrying Charlie through the portal with trained efficiency.

Elara ducked back under Serena’s arm. "Come on, tazer girl."

"Don’t start."

They walked through together. Serena’s boots hit the cavern floor and her next step went straight into the water. Her foot found a slick rock, slipped, and she went in gracelessly, half-stumbling, half-falling into the underground lake with the dignity of a newborn deer on ice.

Elara pressed her lips together so hard they went white. "You need to go under. Open your eyes beneath the surface."

"I know how it works."

"I know you know. I’m telling you because you currently have one functioning eye and one that is disgusting."

Serena sank beneath the surface.

The water responded. It always responded. But the gold that bloomed around her was dim. Muted. A faded version of the light that usually erupted from her skin like a second sun, more candlelight than bonfire, flickering where it should have blazed.

It wasn’t healing like usual. She surfaced.

On the shore, both Dexmon and Fin tilted their heads again. Same angle. Same timing. Two golden-eyed puppets running the same confused subroutine.

Gavriel walked through the portal in time to see Serena standing in the water with one red eye, a bloody nose, and the luminous output of a dying flashlight. He looked at the lake. Looked at Serena. Looked at the lake again.

"Why is it not as bright?" He squinted. "Did you break the lake too, or is this a separate issue?"

"I was wondering that as well," Alaric said, his eyes on Serena with the clinical focus of a man adding another problem to a list that was already too long.

Gavriel stopped wondering. He walked straight into the lake.

No hesitation. No rolling up his sleeves. No acknowledgment of the fact that he was fully clothed, still bandaged from his own injuries, and wading into sacred water like it was a hotel pool and he’d decided the dress code was optional. The water hit his knees, his waist, his chest, and he didn’t slow down until he reached Serena and pulled her against him.

The lake detonated.

Green. Vivid, furious, blinding green, erupting from the water like someone had dropped a sun into it. The dim gold that had been flickering around Serena vanished, swallowed whole by a light so bright it turned the cavern walls into an emerald cathedral and threw shadows so crisp they looked painted.

Alaric threw his arm over his eyes. "What the—"

The light pulsed once. Twice. Then settled into a steady, rolling glow that turned every ripple on the surface into liquid jade.

Serena felt it immediately. The warmth hit her insides like a balm poured directly onto a burn, soothing everything the fire had scorched, everything the portals had frayed, everything the crying and the flying and the bleeding had torn loose. Her ribs stopped screaming. The burst vessel in her eye cooled. The raw, hollowed-out feeling in her chest that had been there since Fin’s office filled in like sand pouring into a hole.

On the stretcher at the water’s edge, Charlie’s face changed. Color bled back into his cheeks like ink spreading through wet paper. The lacerations on his arms and torso, the ones that had been too deep and too infected for anything short of a miracle, began closing. Slowly at first, then faster, the skin knitting itself together in real time, the wounds sealing like someone was running a finger along a zipper.

Alaric lowered his arm. Watched the healing happen. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

On the shore, Dexmon stood motionless. The dragon king’s gold eyes were fixed on Gavriel with an intensity that had nothing to do with jealousy and everything to do with recognition. He was studying him. Reading him. Watching the green light pour from the lake with the expression of someone who had just confirmed a theory they’d been holding for a very long time.

He didn’t blink.

"Dex," Gavriel called. "I say this with love. You are freaking me the fuck out right now."

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