The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 268

Chapter 268: Put Them In A Room With Me

There is a specific kind of panic that belongs to a woman who has just watched a king get murdered in her sleep and knows she has about forty minutes to stop it from happening while awake.

Maelor’s study smelled like ink, old paper, and the particular brand of obsessive organization that only belonged to a man who would commit murder over a misplaced folio.

Serena pulled Dex through the room, her grip on his hand firm, her pace certain.

The study was empty. Candles burned low in their holders, wax pooling on surfaces that Maelor would have heart palpitations about later. Research folios were stacked in towers so precise they looked load-bearing. The chair behind the desk was pushed in at an angle that suggested its occupant had left in a hurry.

"Serena." Dex’s voice was low behind her. "Not that I’m not enjoying the kidnapping, but where are we going?"

"Riven’s throne room. I think." She turned left at the corridor, then right, then left again. Her boots moved before her brain caught up, instinct pulling her through a castle she had never physically walked through but knew the way a body knows its own pulse.

Dex noticed. His hand tightened on hers but he said nothing, because the woman navigating a foreign king’s castle at ten at night with the confidence of a resident was a conversation for after they survived whatever she was leading him into.

Aegon: She knows this castle.

Dex: I see that.

Aegon: She has never been here.

Dex: I see that too.

A door opened twenty feet ahead.

Remus Nightspire stepped into the corridor holding a sword and wearing an expression that communicated he had been woken up and intended to make that everyone’s problem.

The resemblance to Riven was aggressive. Same cheekbones. Same jaw. Same "I will end this conversation on my terms" energy. Nightspire genetics didn’t dilute. They doubled down.

He was close to Serena’s age. Dark-haired, sharp-featured, carrying the Nightspire bone structure with the lean build of a young man who trained every morning and ate ambition for breakfast. His eyes were dark, alert, and currently aimed at two people who had no business being in his father’s castle.

"You have three seconds to explain why the ward alarm just went off and why the Crown Prince of Drakenfell is standing in my corridor."

"Remus," Serena said, like she was greeting a friend. "I think we met a long time ago, but I don’t remember."

She said it the way someone reminds a coworker they’d shared an elevator once. Remus, holding a sword at them in a dark corridor, did not seem to find the tone proportional to the situation.

"Yes. I know who you are."

"I need to speak with your father," Serena said, as if he greeted her back. "Right now."

Remus studied her. His grip on the sword didn’t loosen, but something behind his eyes recalibrated.

"He’s indisposed."

Serena looked at Remus the way a person looks at a locked door they fully intend to walk through. Remus recognized the look. He’d seen it on his father’s face his entire life.

"Remus." Serena’s voice carried a quality that made Dex’s head turn. It was the voice she used when the situation had outrun diplomacy and she was done asking.

"I think your father is in trouble. You as well, and it’s about to happen. I saw you both get assassinated."

The corridor went very quiet. Serena was well aware of how unhinged this probably sounded.

Remus’s face changed. The suspicion didn’t leave, but something else arrived beside it: the cold, rapid calculation of a young man raised by Riven Nightspire, who understood that intelligence delivered at night with this level of specificity was either a trap or a gift, and the woman delivering it had no reason to set the former.

"Follow me."

He moved. Fast. Through corridors that twisted and turned with the labyrinthine complexity of a castle designed by people who believed architecture should double as defense. Serena matched his pace without hesitation, pulling Dex behind her, her feet finding every turn before Remus took it.

Remus noticed. His eyes cut to her once, brief, sharp, the look of a man watching a stranger navigate his home with the ease of a resident.

He didn’t ask. There wasn’t time.

They found Riven in the war room.

He was standing at the head of a long table, still wearing the traveling cloak from the clearing, his left arm held at his side with a stiffness that was deliberate and practiced. Maelor was beside him, robes slightly askew, which for Maelor was the equivalent of being found naked in a ditch. Both men turned when the door opened.

Riven saw Serena first. His expression did precisely nothing, but something behind his eyes flickered, a micro-reaction so small it would have been invisible to anyone who hadn’t just spent twenty minutes watching him kneel beside a tree and talk to a ghost.

Then he saw Dex. His eyebrow moved one fraction of an inch upward.

"Crown Prince." His voice was silk. "I don’t recall issuing an invitation."

The two men regarded each other with the particular warmth of two apex predators sharing a watering hole.

"You didn’t," Dex replied.

"Fascinating." Riven’s attention returned to Serena. "How did you get into my castle?"

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