The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 313

Chapter 313: My Aim Is Impeccable (It Was)

Dex turned her, lifted her, and sat on the stone ledge beneath the window with her on his lap.

Her legs folded across his thighs, her face pressing into his neck, and his arms locked around her the way they always did, with the specific pressure that said: I have you and I am keeping you and the rest of the world can wait.

His thumb found the tears on her cheek. He wiped them with a gentleness that made more come, because the tenderness of the gesture was so at odds with the man who commanded armies and rode dragons that the contrast cracked something in her chest every single time.

The grief came through the matebond. Not just grief. Guilt. Layers of it, dense and complicated, pouring into him like a tide that carried debris from multiple storms. He felt the necklace in it. He felt the trial. He felt Guinevere’s apology and the ugly truth about Agnes and the weight of a friendship she was forbidden from honoring.

He felt Gavriel in it. He knew it was there. He knew it was tangled into the guilt the way roots tangle through soil, inseparable from the ground they grew in.

He said nothing about it.

"I’m sorry for what she did to you," Serena whispered against his neck. "I’m sorry for all of it, Dex. I should have said it before now and I should have said it louder."

He pressed his forehead to hers. His gold eyes were close enough to fill her vision, and the expression in them was the expression she loved most, the one that sat halfway between irreverence and devastation, the one that meant he was about to say something that would either break her heart or make her laugh.

"Baby, she purred at me. She literally purred. Like a cat. I have been chased through two castles by a woman making animal noises. You do realize the bar for apologies has never been lower."

A hiccup-laugh escaped her, wet and broken and exactly what he was aiming for.

He kissed her. Mid-hiccup. His mouth caught hers with the timing of a man who had been waiting for the exact second her grief cracked open enough to let him in, and the kiss was slow and warm and tasted like tears and the word mine.

Her hands found his jaw. His arms tightened. For three seconds, the room contained only them and the sound of her breathing and the warmth of his mouth and the matebond humming between them in a frequency that meant safe.

Then Dex’s entire body changed.

The shift was instantaneous. His arms locked rigid around her, his chest expanding with a sharp inhale, and every muscle in his body coiled with a tension that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the thing his eyes had just found over her shoulder.

She felt it through the matebond before she understood it. A spike of something primal and absolute. Fear that had been transmuted into fury before it finished forming.

"Boo."

The voice came from behind her. Low. Amused. Conversational. The voice of a man who had walked into a room uninvited and wanted credit for the entrance.

Serena’s entire body went rigid on Dex’s lap.

Her spine locked. Her breathing stopped. The matebond from Dex detonated with a protective rage so total it whited out everything else.

The Emperor stood six feet behind them. Not physically. The same way he had appeared in the recovery room, layered over reality like a second image pressed against glass. His dark magic coiled around his boots, and his smile held the specific pleasure of a predator who had found his prey in a moment of vulnerability and intended to savor it.

He moved toward Serena.

One step. His hand reaching forward with the casual intention of a man reaching for something that belonged to him.

Dex’s body ignited.

Gold erupted from his skin with a violence that had nothing to do with thought and everything to do with the place where instinct met bloodline and produced something older than both. The light was blinding, consuming, pouring from every point of contact between his body and Serena’s until they were both wrapped in a shell of power that the Emperor’s projection hit and recoiled from like a hand pulled back from a flame.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify