The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 247

Chapter 247: The First Dragon King’s Mate

Then the memory slowed, and Dexmon’s stomach dropped.

A temple. Ancient stone. Columns cracked and groaning under the weight of a ceiling that was losing its argument with gravity. Dust fell in curtains. The floor shook.

Dexmon watched himself kneel.

Ronan was on the ground.

His body was convulsing, spine arching off the stone, his limbs jerking in patterns that were too rhythmic to be random and too violent to be survivable. His eyes were open, and something was happening to them. The whites were darkening, black spreading inward from the edges like ink dropped in water, consuming color in slow, deliberate increments.

"Why did you do that?" Asher’s voice was raw, broken, the voice of a man watching his brother die and unable to understand the arithmetic that had led them here. "Why the fuck did you do that, Ronan?"

Ronan had taken something meant for Asher. The specifics blurred, the memory protecting itself from its own sharpest edges, but the equation was clear: Asher should be on the floor. Ronan had intervened. Ronan had always intervened. Since they were boys, Ronan Goldenvein had been placing himself between Asher Valerion and every threat the world could invent.

This time, the threat won.

Ronan convulsed again. His hand shot out and caught Asher’s wrist with a grip that was already weakening.

"Natalia," he managed through clenched teeth. "She needs to break it. Or it will infect her through the matebond."

"No." Asher shook his head. "We’re getting you out of here. We’ll find, there’s always—"

"ASH." Ronan’s voice cut through the rambling with a clarity that shouldn’t have been possible for a man whose eyes were turning black. "Look at me."

Asher looked. The black had consumed half of Ronan’s irises. Dark veins were creeping along his neck, spreading outward from his chest, branching and multiplying under his skin like roots of a tree growing in the wrong direction.

"Tell her to break it. Now. Before it reaches her."

Running footsteps. A sound that shattered the air, half-scream, half-sob.

Natalia rounded the corner and collapsed to her knees on Ronan’s other side. Her hands found his face immediately, cupping his jaw, her fingers trembling against skin that was already changing color.

"No." Her voice was barely a whisper. "No, no, no."

"Natalia." Ronan’s hand found hers. "You need to—"

"I am going to fix this." Tears poured down her face, and her voice cracked on every word but refused to break entirely. "We are going to get you out of this temple and find a healer and figure out a cure, because you are going to be a father, Ronan."

The temple groaned. A column behind them split with a sound like a bone breaking.

Ronan went still.

His convulsions stopped for exactly three seconds. His black-veined hand tightened on hers, and he looked at her, really looked at her, and the expression on his face, the one that surfaced through the darkness eating him alive, was the same expression he’d worn in a courtyard when she talked about a book, the same softness, the same devastating tenderness that had survived the loss of two sets of parents, a kingdom, a first mate, and everything else the world had thrown at him.

"A father," he repeated.

"Yes." She was sobbing. "Your son is going to need his dad. So you are going to fight this."

A tear slid from Ronan’s eye. The eye that was still partially his. It traced a path through the dark veins on his cheek and fell to the stone floor.

He smiled.

Then he convulsed again, harder than before, his entire body arching off the stone. His teeth clenched so tight Dexmon heard enamel crack. The black veins spread faster, racing down his arms, branching across his hands, consuming the fingers that were still wrapped around Natalia’s.

"Please," Ronan gasped. His voice was layered now, a second tone bleeding through underneath, something that didn’t belong to him. "Please, Natalia. I don’t want my son touched by this. Or you."

His eyes locked onto hers, and the desperation in them was total.

"Break it. Break it now, before I can’t ask anymore."

Natalia’s face twisted. A sound came from her that Asher had never heard, would never forget, and hoped to never hear again. The sound of a woman being asked to choose between the man she loved and the child she was carrying, and finding that the answer, the terrible, obvious, unforgivable answer, was already decided.

"I, Natalia Moonveil, reject you, Ronan Goldenvein, as my fated mate."

The matebond severed.

Ronan screamed. The sound filled the temple, bouncing off crumbling walls, and then Natalia collapsed forward onto his chest, unconscious, her body going limp like a marionette whose strings had been cut all at once.

The whites of Ronan’s eyes were gone. Black, edge to edge. His body seized one final time, his spine lifting off the stone in an arc that looked mechanical, inhuman, wrong.

Outside the temple, sounds that did not belong to any creature Dexmon recognized. Wet, guttural noises. Scraping. The particular horror of movement that operates on joints bent the wrong direction.

Dexmon turned his head toward the temple entrance. Through the dust and collapsing stone, he saw a figure crawling backward on all fours, its head twisted at an angle that no living spine could accommodate, its movements jerky and rhythmic. It was coming toward them.

More behind it. Shapes in the darkness, moving in the same broken, percussive gait.

Ronan’s hand found Asher’s arm. His grip was iron, fueled by whatever was left of the man underneath the darkness consuming him.

"Leave me." The voice was Ronan’s. Barely. The second tone was louder now.

"Absolutely the fuck I will not."

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