The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 324

Chapter 324: Come With Me, Said The Fae Prince

You know who you are, Gavriel Sterling. But you have forgotten who you were.

Gavriel blinked. The air tasted like pine sap and wild jasmine. He was standing in a courtyard of crystalline stone, the arches threaded with glowing vines.

Two boys tore through the colonnade at a dead sprint.

The taller one, dark-haired and lean, was carrying a frog in each hand and laughing so hard his coordination had deteriorated to the point where his left shoulder clipped a pillar and he kept running without acknowledging it. The younger one was three strides behind, holding a stolen bread loaf above his head like a trophy.

Gavriel knew them both. He knew them because the taller one was himself at eight, green-eyed and grinning, with the innate understanding that rules were suggestions.

The voice spoke again.

Your first life, Fae Prince. Before Drakenfell, before borrowed names and borrowed grief, there was Aelindris. You were named Tristan, son of Atlas. Prince of All Fae.

The younger boy moved the way Finnick Shadowclaw moved, if Finnick Shadowclaw were eight years old and had agreed to steal bread as a tactical exercise rather than a moral failing. The jaw was already there. The watchfulness was already there. The loyalty that would outlast kingdoms was already there, visible in the way he ran beside Tristan rather than behind him, matching his pace, covering his flank, a wolf at eight already practicing the position he would hold for the rest of his life.

The voice spoke a third time, but Gavriel had already connected the pieces.

The wolf who walks beside you has walked beside you before. The first wolf king, named Lucian Moon. He was your shadow in a life where shadows were earned, and he earned his before either of you understood what it would cost.

He watched the two boys disappear around a corner, their laughter bouncing off crystalline stone, and he felt something crack open in his chest that he was never going to be able to close.

✦✦✦

The scene faded into a forest.

Gavriel watched himself as a boy, trying to climb a tree, except this wasn’t Drakenfell and he wasn’t named Gavriel.

This was the boy he’d just seen, two years older, covered in mud, and losing an argument with a wolf pup who refused to accept that climbing a tree was a reasonable life decision.

"I am telling you, Lucian, the branch holds. I tested it."

"You tested it by looking at it. From the ground. That is the opposite of testing."

"It held the bird."

"You weigh more than a bird, Tristan."

"A bit."

Lucian Moon stood at the base of the oak with his arms crossed and the long-suffering expression of a ten-year-old wolf who had been friends with the Fae Prince long enough to understand that logic was a currency Tristan spent selectively.

The forest outside the Fae palace stretched for miles in every direction, ancient trees whose canopies filtered the light into green-gold columns that made the air feel alive. It was the kind of forest that existed in paintings and in the imaginations of children who had never been told that forests could be dangerous, which both of these boys had been told, repeatedly, and had chosen to ignore.

Tristan dropped from the branch. He landed in the mud beside Lucian.

"Race to the river?"

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