The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 328

Chapter 328: Not Blessed By Fate

The problem with growing up beside someone is that you don’t notice them changing until one day you pick them up and the person in your arms isn’t the person you put down last time.

Tristan Aelindor had been in love for seven years before he noticed.

He picked her up the way he always did. Put her down differently. Smiled wrong. Said the right words in the right order with the wrong thing behind them. Then went to his father’s study and slammed the door hard enough to rattle a portrait, and Atlas Aelindor, who had been waiting for this moment for three years, poured a second glass of wine.

Rewinding to the part right before that, Gavriel Sterling stood in a court yard. Three years had passed. He watched a nineteen-year-old version of himself pick up a sixteen-year-old version of Serena.

Tristian had come home from academy and greeted her the way he always did. But she was different. The girl was gone. The woman was arriving, and the transition was occurring at a speed that Tristan’s brain was processing and his body was rejecting because his body understood something his brain was refusing to acknowledge.

He put her down. Smiled. Said something about her hair and her height, and the words were correct and the tone was correct and the feeling behind all of it was wrong in a way that made his chest tight.

That evening, he watched her leave for the evening. Through a window. Standing in front of the window, one hand on the glass, watching her walk across the courtyard with two girls he vaguely recognized from the court, wearing something that was technically a dress and functionally a declaration, laughing in a way that carried on the night air and hit him in the sternum.

He was fine with it. He was absolutely fine with it. He was so fine with it that he went to his father’s study and slammed the door hard enough to rattle the portrait of his grandfather.

"What is she wearing?" Tristan said. "Why is she being allowed to parade around at all hours? Who are these friends? Have they been vetted? I feel strongly that vetting is in order."

Atlas looked at his son with the measured patience of a king who had been waiting for this conversation for approximately three years.

"She is wearing a dress. She is allowed to leave the palace because she is a free woman and a princess of this realm. Her friends are daughters of court officials I have known for twenty years. They have been, as you say, vetted." He paused. "Your concern is noted and transparent."

"I am concerned for her safety."

"You are concerned because she is sixteen and beautiful and leaving a palace you are inside."

Tristan opened his mouth. Closed it.

"Her freedom will be short-lived," Atlas continued, his tone shifting into the register he used when delivering information he knew would be received badly. "I have eighteen months before she is of age. There are suitors. Seven houses have formally expressed interest. I have been keeping them at bay because I refuse to entertain proposals for a girl who still has growing to do, but the inquiries are increasing and my ability to delay is finite."

Something crossed Tristan’s face that Atlas had seen on battlefields. The specific expression of a man hearing intelligence that rearranges his understanding of the terrain.

Atlas studied his son. The Fae King’s magic was old, the oldest bloodline on the continent, and it carried with it a gift that no crown could grant and no enemy could steal: he could feel the emotions of his blood. Every Fae parent could, in varying degrees, but Atlas’s sensitivity was precise, refined, the instrument of a man who had spent thirty years reading people and had started with the ones closest to him.

What he felt from Tristan right now could have powered the sun.

"Tristan. I am trying to set up a good life for her. I understand what you are feeling. I have felt it from you for longer than you have felt it from yourself." He let that settle. "Have you given any thought to who you are going to choose?"

"I have given zero thought to it," Tristan said, and the honesty in the sentence was so total it left no room for the question Atlas was actually asking.

Atlas nodded once. The nod of a father who understood the answer he had received and the answer he had wanted and acknowledged that they were the same thing wearing different clothes.

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