The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 248

Chapter 248: His Son Is My Son

Onyx banked south, and Asher looked back.

The white marble was burning. The golden lions that had guarded the staircases since before his grandfather’s grandfather were buried under rubble. The reflecting pools were black with ash. The colonnade where he and Ronan had sprinted with a stolen crown and a rogue goat was gone, swallowed by stone and fire and the crawling things beneath.

Everything he had ever known was collapsing into itself, and Asher watched it happen with Natalia unconscious against his chest and Ronan’s body cooling under his hand.

He had lost his brother, his kingdom, and his home in the span of an hour. The sky offered nothing. The ground offered less.

Onyx set them down on a ridge overlooking a coastline neither of them recognized. Foreign trees. Foreign soil. A continent that had no name because no one Asher knew had ever stood on it.

Asher pulled Natalia from the dragon’s back and laid her on the grass. Then he turned to Ronan.

Onyx lowered his massive head and pressed his snout against Ronan’s chest. A low sound rumbled through the dragon, not a roar, something older, something that came from the place where a bonded dragon keeps the heartbeat of its human.

The heartbeat wasn’t there anymore.

Onyx lifted Ronan’s body with a gentleness that should have been impossible for a creature his size. His jaws cradled him the way he’d been cradled as a hatchling in Ronan’s arms, and his gold eyes found Asher’s one last time.

Asher pressed his forehead against the dragon’s jaw. "Take care of him."

Onyx launched. His wings beat hard, carrying Ronan into the clouds, and Asher stood on a ridge in a land with no name and watched the last piece of his brother disappear into a sky that was already forgetting the kingdom they’d come from.

He would never see Onyx again. He knew it the way you know things that are too heavy to argue with. Bonded dragons don’t outlive the people they’re bonded to. They go somewhere quiet, somewhere high, and they rest. Together.

✦✦✦

Two days passed. Asher hadn’t slept. He’d built a shelter from driftwood and palm fronds and whatever else the coastline offered, and he’d carried Natalia inside.

A healer from the survivors’ camp pressed her hand to Natalia’s sternum and pulled it back like she’d been burned.

"The matebond severance is killing her. Her body is shutting down. Without a new bond to anchor her, she won’t survive another day."

Asher stood. Every person in the tent looked at him.

"Leave us."

No one moved.

"I said leave."

They left.

He walked to Natalia. She was barely breathing, her skin grey, her white hair matted with sweat and dust and blood that wasn’t hers. She looked like she was already halfway to wherever Ronan had gone, and Asher refused to let her finish the journey.

He knelt beside her. Pulled her upright against his chest. Her head lolled against his shoulder, and he cupped the back of her skull and tilted her neck.

He didn’t ask. There was no one to ask. The woman he loved was dying in his arms, and the man she loved was dead, and the only thing standing between her and a grave in foreign soil was an instinct from a man she hadn’t chosen.

His fangs extended. He sank them into the junction of her neck and shoulder, and her body seized against him, back arching, a gasp escaping from lungs that had been too weak to breathe on their own ten seconds ago.

He felt the matebond take hold, felt it root into both of them like a tree sinking into new ground, and he pulled her onto his chest and wrapped both arms around her and held on.

"You don’t get to die." His voice broke against her hair. "You hear me, Nat? Ronan is gone. The kingdom is gone. Everything I’ve ever had is gone. You are the only thing left, and I cannot lose you too. I won’t. So you are going to live. You are going to live because I need you beside me to rebuild whatever the hell comes next, and because Ronan’s son needs a mother, and because I am telling you to live and you have never once in your life done what I’ve asked but I am begging you to start now."

He pressed his mouth against the top of her head and cried. For the first time since the temple. For Ronan. For the kingdom. For the golden lions and the reflecting pools and the marble corridors where two boys had run with a stolen crown, laughing so hard they couldn’t breathe.

He cried until there was nothing left, and then he held her tighter and waited for her heartbeat to decide.

✦✦✦

Her eyes opened at dawn. Green. Glassy. Confused. She blinked at the canvas above her, at the light filtering through palm fronds, at the unfamiliar sounds of a coast she’d never heard before.

Asher was across the tent in two strides. He dropped to his knees and pulled her against him so hard she gasped.

"You’re alive." He said it into her hair, her neck, her shoulder, anywhere his mouth could reach. "You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive."

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