The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 210

Chapter 210: I’m In Love With Your Mate

White wolves were myths mothers told their children.

He knew she was a white wolf since she mentioned it in Orosia. But actually seeing her stunned him into stillness.

Xeon didn’t wait, ripping through him so fast he didn’t realize the shift was happening until he landed on the ground on four paws.

Fin: Was that necessary?

Xeon: Go to sleep.

Aurelia lay on the ground where the shift had deposited her, sides heaving, adjusting to the sensation of a body that was hers but felt like someone else’s.

Fin: I can’t feel Serena.

Xeon: Serena is resting. It’s just her wolf.

Xeon pressed his nose to her scruff and gently nudged her to stand. She took one step, then another.

Her left hind leg gave out immediately. She hit the ground with a sound that was half impact, half frustration. Her ears flattened. Every signal from her brain was arriving half a second late, routed through pathways the silver had burned to ruin.

She got up again. She took a step. Then another. Her legs held, barely, each stride a negotiation between instinct and a body that had never been used in this form.

The silver had done more than suppress her shift. It had atrophied the neural pathways that should have been present from birth, the ones that made a first shift feel clumsy rather than impossible.

After four steps, her right foreleg buckled. Xeon blocked her fall with his shoulder, and she flinched at the contact.

It hit Fin through the matebond like ice water.

Fin: She flinched.

Xeon: I felt it.

Fin: She doesn’t understand why you helped her.

Xeon: I have eyes.

Xeon held her, letting the rhythm of his ribcage press against hers. She pulled away the moment her legs would hold her and didn’t look at him.

After seven steps, her hind legs crossed and she went down again, this time sideways. Xeon’s nose was under her ribs before she fell, fully supporting her weight. She stiffened.

Fin: Smooth.

Xeon pulled away once she was on her paws, then licked her face shamelessly. She jolted, eyes wide. He nuzzled into her neck, rubbing his scent along her scruff with the subtlety of a six-hundred-pound wrecking ball.

Fin: You are scaring her.

Xeon: No.

Fin: Good rebuttal.

Xeon licked her one more time then nudged her forward. She blinked at him. Then turned away and moved. After a few steps, she stopped, looking back for him.

Xeon: See. She wants us.

Fin: She’s falling again.

He closed the gap, catching her with his nose and helping her stand.

Aurelia steadied herself, then looked at him. Her gold eyes held his for ten full seconds, searching for something that she knew but couldn’t access. Recognition without context. The unsettling certainty that a stranger wasn’t a stranger.

Xeon held still and let her search. Whatever piece of him she was looking for, whatever fragment she was trying to match, he would stand here until she found it.

Déjà vu carved through Fin in tandem so deeply it ached.

Fin: Have I met her before?

Xeon: Yes. She was made for us. But I do not have the memories, so that means we didn’t mate in that life.

They kept going. Aurelia getting further each time. Xeon paced beside her, matching her stride exactly, close enough to catch her if she fell.

After twenty steps, she pressed her nose to his shoulder. Brief. Light. The wolf equivalent of a hand brushing someone’s arm. Plausibly accidental.

It was not accidental.

Xeon went so still Fin thought his wolf had stopped breathing. Six hundred pounds of apex predator, locked in place, because the white wolf had touched him on purpose and the feeling it produced was so big that movement would have shattered it.

Fin: Big feelings there, buddy.

Aurelia’s tail moved. Once. A single, tentative wag that she seemed startled by, as if her own body had betrayed her with joy she had not authorized.

Xeon rumbled low in his chest. The sound was pure satisfaction.

Then she looked at the forest stretching out in front of her, and bolted. Poorly at first, her hind legs overcompensating, her turns sloppy and wide. But it was movement, uninhibited and wild. Joy so raw that it ripped through their matebond and hit Fin like a shockwave.

Xeon surged after her. His instincts were screaming in a single, deafening chorus: chase, catch, claim.

She fumbled over a log, and fell, which sent the wolf-equivalent of a laugh rumbling through him. The look she shot him over her shoulder required no translation.

Mate play. It was instinct distilled to its purest form. A male chasing a female.

Fin: Did she just...

Xeon: Silence.

Xeon: Mine.

Fin: I think she knows.

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