The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 185

Chapter 185: Fight Or Make Out? Yes.

Two Alphas walked slightly too fast, pretending their matebonds weren’t screaming at them like fire alarms in a burning building.

Garrett had sworn Agnes would be on her best behavior. Fin hadn’t known Garrett brought her until an hour ago. Leaving Agnes alone in Darkhowler territory with her father’s allies still circling was a risk Garrett wasn’t willing to take. So Fin allowed it.

He assumed, at worst, there would be tension. The last time Serena and Agnes had been in the same room, there had been a physical fight. He didn’t know the full scope of it, outside of Serena channeling her flame, which even that he found hard to believe.

None of it sounded like Serena.

But something had been pulling at him through the matebond for the better part of that last hour. The matebond carried emotion, not context, and he’d spent the last forty minutes telling himself it was tension from last night and Garrett would help cheer her up.

He was wrong.

Just as they rounded the corner of the east hall, mid-conversation, a voice rang out.

"Omega-grade cock socket and a plea-deal princess want to play politics here."

Fin had heard a lot of things in his life. Battle cries. Death threats. Diplomatic insults. None of them hit quite like ’omega-grade cock socket’ at two in the afternoon.

Then the context caught up.

Garrett went still beside him. The kind of still that preceded very bad decisions made by very good men.

Then Fin saw her, and smelled her tears. A rash had spread on her neck, the kind that came from sustained cortisol. His chest constricted.

Next to her was Agnes, who, to her deranged credit, was not backing down. She was an inch from Guinevere’s face, and the energy between them had crossed from hostility into something so charged that Garrett’s hand had come up to his own jaw, rubbing it slowly.

Fin wasn’t sure if he needed to intervene or sell tickets.

"You have the sexual energy of a woman who fucks with the lights off and still disappoints, and the entitlement of a HOA president in a tiara that every person avoids eye contact with because you’re an annoying bitch."

Xeon: I am reluctantly impressed.

Guinevere leaned forward. Their lips were nearly touching. For one deeply confusing second, Fin couldn’t tell if they were about to fight or make out, and based on Serena’s expression, she was running the same calculation.

Then Guinevere kissed Agnes.

Fin stopped walking.

Garrett stopped breathing.

Agnes’s eyes blew wide, her body going rigid for exactly one second before something behind her expression recalibrated, and she grabbed Guinevere by the back of the neck and kissed her back.

Guinevere’s tea was in between them, unspilled.

They broke apart, both breathing like they’d run a circuit of the grounds.

Serena stood frozen in the alcove, watching the entire thing with an expression that suggested her soul had temporarily vacated her body.

Fin would have found it funny if he wasn’t still processing the fact that Guinevere had just kissed Garrett Darkhowler’s mate in front of all of them.

Garrett had not moved. He was staring at Agnes with the thousand-yard focus of a man replaying the last ninety seconds on a loop and finding no version of it that made sense.

"Agnes." His voice was careful. The tone he used to defuse something he didn’t fully understand. "What just happened?"

"Allergies," Agnes answered.

Garrett blinked. "That is not what allergies look like."

Fin crossed the hall in four strides, and pulled Serena into his arms. She melted into him immediately, relief bleeding through their matebond.

His hand cupped the back of her head. His chin rested on her hair. His eyes, however, lifted over the top of Serena’s head onto Guinevere.

Something in his expression shifted in the kind of cold, surgical recognition that came when someone you trusted revealed exactly how little they deserved it.

Garrett, meanwhile, had already locked onto the scene: Agnes with a look that promised violence, Guinevere standing rigid with a teacup, and Serena buried in Fin’s arms looking like she’d been through a war.

"Agnes. What happened?" he repeated the question. Then he grabbed her waist, yanking her closer with a territorial grip Serena had never seen from him before.

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