The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 261

Chapter 261: You Told Me You Loved Her

Gavriel Sterling walked into his Alpha’s study the way a man walks into a courtroom when he already knows the verdict.

Dex was standing by the hearth, two glasses on the table beside him, a bottle of whiskey already open. The fire was low. The room was quiet in the specific way rooms became when the man inside them had been thinking for too long and had arrived at conclusions he could no longer avoid.

"Sit," Dex said.

Gav sat.

Dex poured both drinks. Slid one across the table without ceremony, the same way his father did, because some gestures were inherited whether you wanted them or not. He lowered himself into the opposite chair, and for a long moment, neither of them spoke.

The fire filled the silence with the only sound it knew how to make, which was the sound of something burning.

Gav picked up the glass. Didn’t drink. Turned it once in his hand, watching the amber catch the light, and then he started talking, because Gavriel Sterling had never been a man who waited for permission to bleed.

"I know sorry isn’t enough." His voice was stripped of every weapon he usually carried. No sarcasm, no deflection, no irreverence deployed like armor. Which, for Gavriel Sterling, was the emotional equivalent of showing up naked. Dex would have preferred the armor. At least then he could have hit it.

But this was just a man sitting in a chair across from his best friend, holding a drink he hadn’t earned yet. "I’m going to say it anyway. I’m sorry, Dex."

He exhaled and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, the whiskey held loosely between both hands.

"What happened with Serena was adrenaline. The kiss, the confession, all of it. Heightened emotions in an impossible situation, and I let it get tangled with something it shouldn’t have." His jaw worked once before the next words came. "I have my fated mate now. The draw I felt toward Serena because of the ancestors’ oath."

"Ancestor’s oath," Dex repeated.

"Serena can tell you more about it. Just more ancestor garbage about past lives. I was her protector in her first life. I mistook it for something it wasn’t, and I’m owning that."

Gav did not disclose the rest of it. That would be up to Serena who had the memory of a steel trap. Gavriel could blame it on forgetting.

Dex said nothing. He drank.

Gav continued, and his voice changed register, dropping into the lower, rougher range that meant the next part was going to hurt.

"With Bellatrix." He swallowed. "It started before Serena was ever in Drakenfell. I thought your mother was lonely and needed a friend. That’s how it began. She told me that she and your father had an understanding. An open arrangement. She said it was mutual."

The fire popped once. Dex’s eyebrow moved approximately one-eighth of an inch. On the Drakenfell scale, that was the equivalent of flipping a table.

As far as his parents went, he had known for years that the marriage was loveless, had grown up inside the architecture of two people who shared a kingdom and nothing else. But hearing it confirmed aloud, by the man sitting across from him, in this room, with this whiskey, made the abstract concrete in a way that settled in his chest like a stone dropped into still water.

"It happened twice," Gav continued. "I stopped it after that because it felt wrong, regardless of what she told me. The arrangement doesn’t excuse it. I knew she was married. I knew she was your mother. I should have walked away the first time, and I didn’t, and that is on me."

"Bold of you," Dex said, "to use the phrase ’on me’ in a conversation about sleeping with my mother."

Gav closed his eyes. "I walked right into that."

"You walked into several things you shouldn’t have. Apparently."

"You’re right."

Gav looked at Dex. Held his eyes. Didn’t flinch. It cost him. Everything in his body was screaming to look away, to drop his gaze, to retreat behind the armor of humor that had carried him through every hard conversation he’d ever had. But this wasn’t a conversation he could charm his way out of.

This was a man he had wounded sitting three feet away, giving him the chance to own the blade, and Gavriel Sterling owed him the dignity of looking at the damage.

"I understand if you’re done with me. But you were a brother to me, Dex. You are a brother to me. And I am most of all sorry that I hurt you."

The words landed in the room and the room absorbed them the way stone absorbs rain: slowly, completely, without giving any indication of what was happening underneath.

Dex stared at him. "You slept with my mother and you’re calling me brother. You understand the layers there, right? You see how that sentence works against you?"

His fingers pressed white against the glass. His pulse was hammering in a place behind his sternum that had nothing to do with anger anymore and everything to do with grief. Grief for the version of this friendship that had existed before Serena, before Bellatrix, before every confession peeled another layer off a thing he had believed was solid. He had trusted Gav like gravity. Instinctively. Without checking.

He took another drink of whiskey. He held it in his mouth for a second longer than necessary, using the burn to swallow down the lump that had formed in his throat.

"The problem with chalking Serena up to adrenaline," Dex said, his voice quiet, "is that you told me you’ve been in love with her, Gav."

The sentence landed where Dex aimed it: directly in the center of the narrative Gav had just constructed.

Dex registered that. The word wanted, past tense, as if the apology had been a living thing that was now being spoken about in memoriam.

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