The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate

"The instinct, for both the host and the wolf, is to pull away from it," Maelor continued. "Her wolf is probably doing exactly that and doesn’t realize it. But the more her wolf pulls, the tighter it constricts. It’s a trap designed to punish resistance. The fighting is what feeds it."

Serena’s stomach dropped.

"The roots you’re feeling." Maelor’s eyes landed on Gavriel. "Are latched around her soul. You cannot extract it in pieces. It’s a puzzle. All or nothing. You pull one root and leave another, the remaining root reattaches everything you removed and it comes back worse. Stronger. More entrenched."

"How do you solve it?" Gavriel asked.

"You get to the bottom."

Everyone looked at Dexmon. The dragon king’s voice had come out calm, measured, the answer delivered with the certainty of a man who had seen this before and remembered exactly how it worked.

Maelor’s eyebrows rose. He had expected brilliance from Gavriel. He had not budgeted for it from Dexmon. His budget was now overdrawn.

"Yes. Correct." He recovered quickly. "There is more than one bottom. So the key is identifying how many bottoms exist before you pull. You must map the entire root system first. Every anchor point. Every attachment. If you miss one, even one, the tether regenerates from whatever remains. And the regenerated version will be more aggressive than the original."

He paused. Something shifted in his expression.

"The cloak I placed on it slows the growth, but it does not stop it. It is still feeding. Still expanding. Still wrapping itself deeper into her soul, her wolf, and her magic." His gaze moved to Gavriel. Stayed there. "That is likely why your magic is behaving the way it is. It senses hers is not filling properly and it’s trying to compensate. Your magic is pouring into the gaps the tether is creating."

Gavriel looked down at the green light still curling around Serena without his permission. His magic, filling holes he hadn’t known existed, patching a system that was leaking from the inside.

"How long does she have?" Gavriel asked.

Maelor didn’t answer immediately. The pause was worse than any answer would have been.

Maelor’s hands started glowing green.

Serena knew what was coming. She’d been through this before. The diagnostic knockout, the magical equivalent of being put under so a mage could root around in her system without her body fighting back. She knew it was necessary. She knew it didn’t hurt. She also knew that knowing those things didn’t stop her lungs from tightening or her fingers from gripping the edge of the infirmary bed hard enough to turn her knuckles white.

Then calm hit her through the matebond.

Steady. Measured. Warm. The exact frequency Fin always used when he could feel her spiraling, the precise emotional tone he’d perfected over months of reading her panic before it peaked and meeting it with a stillness so practiced it felt like a hand on her chest telling her heart to slow down.

It was perfect.

For a moment, it worked. Then it didn’t. It was Fin’s calm in every way except for the man sending it.

Serena’s face crumpled.

It lasted half a second. Maybe less. A fracture that shot across her composure and sealed itself before anyone should have been able to catch it, grief so sudden and so total that it overpowered Ronan’s calm like a wave swallowing a candle. Because the calm was Fin and she knew the difference, even if her body didn’t, and being soothed by a Fin from a past life who didn’t understand how much Fin wished he had never met her was worse than not being soothed at all.

The grief detonated through every open connection she had.

Dexmon and Fin tilted their heads in unison. Same angle. Same ancient confusion. Two dead kings registering a surge they hadn’t expected from a direction they hadn’t predicted.

The synchronized head tilt was involuntary and identical and would have been creepy-cute if the context weren’t soul-crushing.

Gavriel’s hands clenched at his sides, his body reacting to the wave of grief before his brain could sort out where it came from or why it had arrived shaped like heartbreak. The matebond delivered it again just in case he missed it the first time. He didn’t.

His green magic flared so hard the glow filled the room like an emerald greenhouse. Maelor would have been impressed if he weren’t busy triangulating a grief bomb, and Alaric would have complained if the green weren’t actively helping his patient more than his medicine was.

Maelor paused. His glowing hands hovered mid-air, the diagnostic suspended. His eyes moved from Serena and landed on Fin. Then they went to Dexmon. One of them had upset her. That was clear as day. The small amount of Fae magic she had left in the tank was screaming it. The tether was also substantially more eroded than expected. And he had been fully expecting it.

Gavriel was doing the same math. His confusion lasted two seconds, his brow furrowing, his eyes scanning the room for the origin of the grief that had just poured through Serena like someone had opened a valve. His gaze landed on Fin first.

Then moved off him.

Because Serena always went to Fin. Fin was her constant. Fin was the one she turned to when things got heavy, the one whose calm she borrowed when her own ran out. There was no way Fin would make her face collapse like that.

Unless possessed-Fin’s creepy little message from a few minutes ago was literal and he had literally told her to get the hell out. Gavriel shook his head. Nope. That was not Fin Shadowclaw.

His eyes landed on Dexmon. That made more sense. Possibly, that’s why the Dragon King was here. Dexmon was the one currently being driven by someone else. Dexmon was the variable. Dexmon was the more believable source of something unexpected hitting Serena’s matebond and cracking her composure.

He was wrong. But he didn’t know that yet.

Serena didn’t look at any of them. She stared at her hands in her lap, jaw working, swallowing twice before she trusted her voice.

"Maelor." Quiet. Controlled. Barely. "Can you please just do it. I’ll get nervous if there’s too much buildup."

That was partially true.

Maelor didn’t question it.

His green magic hit her like a freight train. One second she was sitting upright, jaw clenched, fingers locked around the mattress edge, holding herself together with spite and will. The next second her eyes rolled back, her grip went slack, and she collapsed backward onto the bed with the boneless finality of a woman whose body had finally been given permission to stop.

Three men lunged. Three men, who were all still healing and not supposed to be doing any sudden movements, lurched forward at the exact same time with the exact same trajectory towards the exact same woman. Of course they did.

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