The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 252

Chapter 252: Seven Fucking Days, Dex

The first thing Dexmon registered was sixty pounds of attitude sitting on his lungs.

He didn’t know it yet, but he’d been dead to the world for seven days.

His eyelids were heavy. Consciousness returned in fragments. His throat felt like he’d swallowed sand and chased it with gravel. There was an I.V. in his left arm, and the tubing caught the low firelight when he shifted, a thin line tethering him to a stand he had no memory of agreeing to.

He blinked. Twice.

Gold eyes blinked back.

Onyx was curled on his chest, his small body a dense knot of black scales. The dragon’s chin rested directly over Dex’s heart, as if he’d been monitoring the beat of it, counting every thud to make sure it kept going.

Dex stared at him.

Onyx stared back. Then chirped once, soft and uncertain, the way he did when he was checking if something was real.

Something cracked open behind Dex’s ribs that had nothing to do with injury.

The memory surfaced uninvited. A black dragon, the grief sound it made when its bonded died, and the way it flew away from the world and never came back.

Dex’s hand came up slowly. His fingers found the ridge between Onyx’s wings and scratched, gentle, deliberate, with an intimacy he would deny under oath if anyone ever asked.

"Hey, little man," he rasped.

Onyx’s entire body vibrated. A purr rolled through him so deep it rattled Dex’s sternum, and the dragon pressed his face harder into Dex’s chest, his claws flexing against the fabric of the bedsheet in rhythmic, contented kneading.

Dex kept scratching. His jaw tightened, and something burned behind his eyes that he would also deny under oath.

"I know who you are," he whispered. "I know who you were."

Onyx lifted his head. His gold eyes locked onto Dex’s with an intelligence that had no business existing in something that small. Then he pressed his forehead to Dex’s chin and held it there, still, like a vow renewed in silence.

Dex closed his eyes and let his hand rest on the back of Onyx’s neck.

If the room had been full, he would have already been making a joke, and poured himself a drink. But the room was dark, and the fire was low, and no one was watching.

So he held on.

He held on the way Onyx’s past life had held his brother. Fierce and final and unashamed.

A minute passed. Then his senses sharpened, and a second presence registered.

To his right. Close. Sitting in a chair pulled flush against the bed.

Serena.

Her white hair fell loose around her shoulders, catching firelight at the edges where it turned to gold, thick and unruly and cascading past the arm of the chair.

But that was where the beauty ended and the damage began.

Her skin was drawn tight across her cheekbones, hollowed in a way that made his chest seize. Dark circles bruised the skin beneath her eyes. The smell of salt. Tears that had dried and been replaced by fresh ones so many times that the scent had soaked into the fabric of her training suit and the leather of the chair itself.

She looked wrecked.

Dex’s hand stilled on Onyx’s neck. His throat tightened so hard he couldn’t swallow.

He let out a breath and forced himself to move. He needed water ten minutes ago. He looked at the I.V. in his arm, then ripped it out.

Onyx, who had been purring contentedly on his chest, was displaced without ceremony. A sound escaped his throat that was less chirp and more personal betrayal, high-pitched and theatrical, as if Dex had committed a war crime against his comfort.

Onyx huffed and gave a look that said, You moved me.

"Relax," Dex rasped. "I’ll be right back."

Onyx did the opposite of relaxing. He puffed up to roughly twice his size, every scale bristling, his tail lashing once against the sheets in a display of fury that would have been terrifying if he wasn’t a baby.

Dex ignored him and crossed to the cooling cabinet built into the stone wall.

He grabbed a tonic and drank it standing. The liquid hit his throat like mercy. He finished it in four swallows, gasped once, and grabbed a second.

The second one he drank slower, only because his hands were shaking and he needed the extra seconds to pretend they weren’t.

Behind him, Onyx settled into a seething loaf on the mattress, wings still half-raised, gold eyes tracking Dex’s every movement with unblinking irritation.

Dex turned back to the bed. To Serena.

She was still asleep. Utterly unconscious, folded in that chair like exhaustion had dragged her under mid-vigil and she’d gone without a fight. Her breathing was slow and shallow, the kind of sleep that came after a body had been pushed past every reasonable limit and finally surrendered.

He moved to her carefully, more carefully than he moved through any battlefield, any war room, any negotiation.

One arm slid beneath her knees. The other curved around her back, gathering her against his chest. He laid her on the bed gently. Then he unzipped her training suit slowly, easing the material down her shoulders, then her arms, working it off her body with a patience he reserved for precisely two things: disarming explosives and undressing Serena when she was asleep. Both required steady hands and an acceptance that one wrong move ended everything.

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