The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 297

Chapter 297: The Boys First. (She Was Dying.)

Serena was conscious. Her green eyes were open, glassy with pain, and her breathing was shallow and wrong. Her white hair was soaked, plastered to the stone beneath her in heavy, tangled ropes, and her skin had gone a shade of gray that made Gav’s chest constrict so hard he forgot to breathe.

She had been there the entire time. Through every scream, every extraction, every second of triage on Fin and Dex, she had been twenty feet away with dark magic burrowing into her body. And she hadn’t called out once.

Gav found the zipper on the back of her training suit and pulled it down.

The bottom dropped out of his stomach.

Three black spikes protruded from her body. One buried deep in her left side, wet with blood that was still running. One in her lower back, angled toward her spine. And one embedded between her shoulder blades, the skin around it already blackened and pulsing with the same sickening rhythm they had seen in Dex and Fin.

The corruption had spread further than either of theirs. Dark veins branched outward from each spike in dense, deliberate patterns, threading beneath her skin in roots that were actively digging for something to feed on.

And they were feeding. On her magic. The faint gold shimmer that always lived beneath her skin was dimming in real time, the light retreating from the blackened veins like a tide being swallowed by oil.

"Gods," Aeron breathed.

Fin’s head snapped toward them.

He saw Gav crouched over Serena. He saw the look on Gav’s face. And the sound that came out of Finnick Shadowclaw was beyond language, beyond rank, beyond anything his training had ever prepared him to contain.

Every wound he had just endured, every spike, every extraction, every ounce of agony still burning through his body, became irrelevant in the span of a single heartbeat.

He tried to stand.

"Stay down," Aeron ordered.

Fin ignored him entirely. His legs buckled on the first attempt, and he caught himself on one knee. On the second push he was upright and moving, his dislocated arm hanging at his side, blood still running from his ribcage. He crossed those twenty feet with the grim, relentless stride of a man who would crawl across broken glass before he let another second pass without reaching her.

He dropped beside Gav. His good hand found Serena’s, and his grip was immediate and crushing.

"How long." Fin’s voice was quiet. The wrong kind of quiet. "How long has she been here."

"The whole time," Gav answered, and the guilt in his voice was a living thing.

Serena’s eyes shifted to Fin. Her lips barely moved. "The boys first."

Fin’s jaw clenched so hard the muscle jumped. Through their matebond, he felt everything. The pain, layered and relentless, a white-hot agony radiating from three separate points in her body. Each spike was feeding corruption into her blood with every pulse, and she had been feeling this the entire time they worked on Dex and him. She had stayed silent on purpose. She had chosen this.

"Don’t you ever do that again," Fin said, his voice cracking at the edges.

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