The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 333

Chapter 333: It Has Always Been You (Damn It)

"You went out," Tristan said, rising from the chair.

River paused in the doorway. "I did. Elowen and Cassia hosted a—"

"You didn’t tell me."

She blinked. "You were in meetings all day. It didn’t seem like it needed a formal notice."

"It needed a notice." His voice climbed past the register he used for anything, ever, and he heard it happen and could not stop it. "You walked across the entire city, at night, in a dress I have never seen, with people I have not met, and the first I hear of it is from a page carrying laundry. Do you understand how that lands? Do you have any idea what it does to me to find out from the laundry?"

"Tristan—"

"You could have been hurt. You could have been anywhere. I sat in that chair for four hours running through every road between here and the eastern district, and you strolled in glowing like the evening was nothing, like I wasn’t—" He stopped. His jaw worked. Ten years of the wrong word crowded up behind his teeth. "Like it costs me nothing to watch you leave."

River’s own temper rose to meet his, because she had never once in her life backed down from him and did not intend to start. "It is not your business where I go. I am a free woman. You told me that yourself, on the wall, when you taught me to climb something I was forbidden to climb. You cannot hand me freedom and then rage at me for using it."

"That was before."

"Before what?"

"Before I could no longer breathe correctly in a room you have left!"

The corridor went silent. The words hung there, out at last, impossible to jam behind his back or blame on the furniture or reassign to a distant wolf king.

River stared at him.

Her mouth opened. Closed. For the first time in the entire courtship, the economical girl who was never at a loss reached for something to say and came up completely, spectacularly empty.

Tristan crossed the distance before either of them decided he should.

He caught her face in both hands, the way he had once tilted it toward the light on the day a king gave her a name, and he kissed her with a decade of held breath behind it. It was nothing careful. His fingers slid into the white hair he had gotten up at dawn to find flowers for, and River made a small, startled sound against his mouth, and then her hands fisted in the front of his shirt and she pulled him closer rather than pushing him back, kissing him with the same stubborn conviction she brought to every single thing she had ever refused to lose.

When he broke away, he stayed close, his forehead against hers, both of them unsteady.

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