The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 298

Chapter 298: She Gave It Anyway

Gav pulled. Maelor matched him, emerald light flooding in as the spike came free with a crack of compressed tissue. Serena screamed again, more ragged this time, weaker, and her consciousness was flickering at the edges, her green eyes losing focus.

Fin leaned close to her ear. "Stay here. Look at me, Serena. Stay."

Her green eyes found his. Glazed. Drifting.

"Last one," Maelor said. His clinical distance had crumbled entirely, replaced by the focused intensity of a man who understood the margin between alive and dead had narrowed to the width of his next decision. "Between the shoulder blades. The corruption is deepest here. I need thirty seconds of uninterrupted extraction after the spike clears."

"You’ll have it," Gav said.

He gripped the final spike with both hands, braced himself, and looked at Maelor.

Maelor’s palms ignited. The emerald burned brighter than before, tinged at the edges with gold that Hyran recognized as something he had encountered in exactly zero textbooks.

"Now."

Gav pulled. Every ounce of strength he had left went into that single motion, tearing the spike free from between her shoulder blades with a wet, sickening wrench that sprayed blood across his chest and arms.

Serena’s scream cut off. Her eyes rolled. Her body went limp, and the sudden silence was worse than every scream that had preceded it.

"Don’t stop," Gav commanded.

Maelor’s palms were buried in emerald light, both hands pressed flat against her back, and the magic pouring from him was so dense the air around them hummed with it. Black smoke erupted in thick, writhing columns from her wounds, more than either Fin or Dex had produced, and the stream was endless, pouring from her body as though the corruption had been feeding on something inside her that the others lacked.

Her magic. It had been feeding on her magic.

Maelor’s nose began to bleed. A thin line of red tracked from his left nostril to his upper lip, the same signature cost he always paid when his magic pushed into territory that mage discipline alone could never reach. He ignored it, teeth gritted, fingers digging into the light.

Hyran moved in beside him without hesitation, placing his hands alongside Maelor’s, feeding gold magic into the channel the Fae magic had carved. Two streams, emerald and gold, working in tandem. One ripping the dark threads free. The other sealing what was left behind.

Thirty seconds felt like thirty years.

When the last thread of corruption dissolved, Maelor pulled his hands back and swayed once before catching himself. The nosebleed had worsened; both nostrils were running now, blood dripping steadily onto the stone.

"Done," he said, and his voice was thin and hollow.

Hyran stayed. Gold magic poured through her wounds, slower on Serena than it had been on the others, the tissue damage deeper, the healing reluctant and stubborn. Color returned to her skin in painful, incremental degrees.

Fin still held her hand. His thumb pressed against her pulse point, counting each beat, waiting for it to strengthen. Her breathing was threadbare, each inhale a shuddering labor, and each exhale carried a faint, involuntary whimper that she would have hated if she were conscious enough to know.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify