The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 227

Chapter 227: She Bit For His Ass Cheek

"Serena, no, this is not what you think, I was asleep. Baby, look at me."

Serena looked at him, hand shaking over her mouth.

"I don’t want to make this awkward," Guinevere said. "But he finished twice."

Dex’s entire body went rigid. "I did NOT."

"The sheets tell a different story, Dexmon." Guinevere looked at Serena. "He’s vigorous. You should be proud. I am."

"She’s lying."

"Am I? Where are your pants, Dexmon?"

"You have them. Give me my pants. Now."

"Exactly." Guinevere tilted her head, exposing the side of her neck toward Serena. There was a red mark there. "He was a little rough, but we cuddled after. Adorable. Does he do that with you too, or is that just an us thing?"

"That is NOT a mark," Dex said. "I did not touch her. Serena, I did not touch her."

"He talks in his sleep, by the way. He kept saying I’m sorry. Did you two fight?"

"How do you.... Serena, she’s lying."

She touched the crescent moon pendant at her throat and smiled at Serena. "He also gave me this. Said Finnick gave it to him or something for you, but he wanted to give it to me instead as a token. I thought it was sweet. Don’t you think?"

Serena looked at the pendant, tears falling. Then she turned and ran.

"Serena."

Dex moved.

The sheet did not come with him. He made it one step before remembering this, spun back, ripped a tunic off the back of the nearest chair, yanked it over his head as he hit the doorway, grabbed the trousers Guinevere had set down on the mattress, and was attempting to pull them on.

Guinevere grabbed onto his naked form before his pants were pulled up. He ignored her.

Aegon: She is trying to mark our butt cheek. HURRY!

"Serena, wait."

She did not wait.

She ran the way she ran when she did not want to be caught, which was at speeds that no one in this castle except him and Finnick could match.

Aegon: Faster.

Dex: I’m going.

Aegon: FASTER.

He rounded the first corner and caught her scent, with tears.

"Serena, stop. Please."

He heard her boots round the stair landing two corridors ahead, and then he heard nothing, which was worse.

Dex: Serena. Baby. Please.

Nothing.

The sudden absence of her scent meant a portal had taken her, and the direction of the draft coming down the stair meant the portal had been going west.

He stopped running, one hand braced against the wall of the corridor, breathing through the specific hollow that opened in his chest when the matebond went quiet on her end. The connection was still there.

Aegon: Go after her.

Dex: I need a portal.

Aegon: RUN. SHE’S COMING AFTER US.

He turned.

Guinevere was coming down the corridor behind him at a dead sprint.

"Dexmon, darling, you are making this harder than it needs to be, I have a whole Chapter to show you."

She was still nude. She was still wearing the circlet. The crescent-moon pendant was bouncing against her breasts with every stride.

Her hair was everywhere.

Two Shadowclaw guards were posted at the corridor intersection.

They did not react.

One of them was looking at the ceiling. The other had developed, in the last ninety seconds, an intense interest in the state of his left boot. Neither of them acknowledged, by any movement of the face or body, that the Alpha King’s cousin had just sprinted past them wearing a decorative household object and nothing else.

Dex stared at them.

Aegon: Are you fucking kidding me? They don’t see the nude woman.

Dex opened his mouth. He closed it.

She lunged for him, fangs extended. He moved out of the way in a blur. The guards were looking anywhere but the naked woman.

He turned, because Guinevere was now closing the distance.

At which point the door at the end of the corridor opened, and Finnick Shadowclaw walked out.

Fin was dressed. He had the flat, burning expression of an Alpha whose mate was in acute distress and was not responding to any of his mindlinks.

He had crossed three corridors at speed, following the thread of her grief, and he had arrived at the scene approximately ninety seconds after she had portaled out of it.

Guinevere threw herself against the nearest wall with a thud that was, Dex realized in real time, rehearsed. Her hand flew to her own throat. Her breath came in a short, choked little gasp that a lesser audience might have mistaken for a woman recovering from an ordeal. She slid halfway down the wall in a controlled descent.

Dex stared at her.

"Finnick. Oh, Finnick. Thank the gods. He was going to mark me," she said, her voice trembling. "He pulled me into the bed. He would not let me leave. I tried, Finnick, I tried, but he is so much stronger, and his wolf was, oh gods, his wolf was—"

"ARE YOU KIDDING ME?"

"I am sorry I did not come to you sooner, cousin, I was frightened, I did not want to cause a diplomatic—"

"She has been chasing me around your guest suite making cat noises."

"He is lying, Finnick, you can see he is lying, look at him, he cannot even fasten his own trousers."

Dex looked down. His trousers were, in fact, on backwards.

Aegon: This is the lowest moment of our life.

Dex: I am aware.

Aegon: I want to be very clear that I will remember this.

"Finnick. I swear to every god. She got into my bed at three in the morning. I woke up, I screamed, she has chased me around the suite, and she tried to bite my neck while making noises I am not going to describe because I would like to sleep again at some point in my life."

Fin looked at him.

Dex heard the sentence he had just produced out loud, in a hallway, to a foreign Alpha King. "I know how that sounds."

Fin’s eyes moved back to Guinevere. "Again, Guinevere?"

"Again?"

He had seen the pendant, and he had registered it as Serena’s. He had not registered it as her mother’s, because he had not known, because it had never come up. The specific grief that had come through the matebond twenty minutes ago, restructured itself in his head into a wound he could now actually identify.

Aegon: Kill this bitch.

"When you say it like that."

Aegon: I thought our family was fucked.

Dexmon: My mother never stole another girl’s necklace that belonged to her dead mother.

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