The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 332

Chapter 332: You Had It. You Handed It To A Table.

As the Dragon King tried to soothe a howling green dragon, across Drakenfell, Gavriel Sterling lay unconscious. His mind and soul were visiting another life far away.

✦✦✦

Gavriel Sterling stood at the edge of a sunlit courtyard he had never walked, and he recognized it in his bones anyway. He watched a prince conduct the least subtle courtship in the recorded history of the Fae realm, and he watched the girl at the center of it fail to notice a single move, and he thought, with the exhausted fondness of a man reading his own file, she has no idea. She has genuinely no idea.

Lucian was gone north, first king of the wolves, ruling a kingdom he had built out of grit and loyalty. His absence left nobody to elbow Tristan in the ribs and say the obvious thing out loud, which meant the obvious thing had gone gloriously unsaid for months.

AELINDRIS - THE MORNING

The flowers were the first casualty.

Tristan Aelindor had risen before the household, walked to the wild garden, and selected the flowers with the strategic care of a man choosing a battlefield. White ones, because they would sit against her hair. He carried them back through three corridors, rehearsing a sentence that was easy and casual and would make the whole gesture look like an accident he had stumbled into rather than a campaign he had lost sleep over.

River rounded the corner ahead of schedule.

Tristan turned. His hand, entirely without consulting him, jammed the flowers behind his back and crushed half of them against the stone.

"Good morning," he said, in the voice of a man who had done nothing and was doing nothing and would continue to do nothing.

River studied him. "What is behind your back?"

"My back."

"Behind that."

"More of my back. It goes quite far." He produced the flowers, now a tragedy of bent stems and shed petals, and looked at them with the dawning horror of a general watching a plan collapse. "These were for the table. The dining table. I thought it looked bare."

River took them. She examined the mangled bouquet, then examined his face, and a small line appeared between her brows. "You picked flowers for the furniture."

"The furniture works hard. Nobody appreciates it."

"That is genuinely thoughtful of you," she said, and she meant it, and she walked off to find a vase for the dining table with the flowers he had gotten up at dawn to gather for her hair.

Tristan watched her go. He turned to a passing servant and said, very quietly, "Not one word."

Gavriel, standing invisible in the corridor, put a hand over his own face. You had it. You had the whole thing. You handed it to a table.

✦✦✦

THE LIBRARY

He tried again with a book.

Friend. The word went into him like a splinter. He smiled through it with the discipline of a man taking a blade in a duel he had agreed to.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify