The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 336

Chapter 336: You Having Tummy Problems, Bro?

The Moon Goddess had a sense of timing that bordered on cruelty. Gavriel Sterling had been bracing for this since the visions started because the ancestors had already told him what happened. But the longer the visions went, the more uneasy he felt. What he didn’t expect was for it to happen like this.

The corridor darkened for a fraction of a second as two figures appeared at the entrance.

Then the wind shifted.

It came from the sea, sweeping across the courtyard and up the aisle, carrying with it every scent in the corridor behind the entrance, and the scent that reached the front of the courtyard was white roses and salt air and something underneath both of those things, something warm and clean and ancient that had no name in any language Lucian Moon spoke and every name in the language his blood recognized.

Lucian stiffened.

The shift was total and instantaneous. Every muscle in his body locked. His pupils blew wide, the black swallowing the color until his eyes were dark pools reflecting the afternoon light. His shoulders went rigid. His jaw clamped. A low, involuntary rumble built in his chest, a sound too deep for the guests to hear but close enough for Tristan to feel it through the air between them.

His wolf surged so hard his vision split.

Every compass inside Lucian Moon, every instinct that had spent twenty years pointing quietly at a girl he had never been permitted to reach for, detonated. The scent filled his lungs and his lungs refused to release it, holding the air the way a drowning man holds a rope, and the wolf inside his chest hit the walls of his control with a force that should have dropped him.

Mate.

The word tore through him with the weight of a verdict delivered by a god who had been silent for two decades and had chosen this, this exact second, to finally speak.

Mate. MATE. She is OURS.

Lucian couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t do anything except stand at the front of a bonding ceremony for his best friend and feel the floor of his entire life give way beneath him.

Tristan turned his head. He looked at Lucian the way you look at a friend whose face has gone a color that suggests a medical event.

Gavriel’s chest ached watching.

He knew what this was because the ancestors had told him, because the vision had shown him, because the grief in his current body was the same grief wearing a different suit: Lucian’s soul had been fated to hers. Across lifetimes. The first thread ever woven between souls, the ancestors had said. A gift from the Gods. He didn’t understand the difference between that and the fae bond he kept hearing Tristan reference, but something told him it was deeper.

"You having tummy problems, bro?" Tristan asked.

Lucian didn’t answer.

His eyes were locked on the corridor entrance. His chest was rising and falling in a rhythm that had abandoned anything resembling normal respiration. Every instinct in his body was screaming at him to move, to cross that aisle, to reach the source of the scent before the rational part of his brain could stop him, and the rational part of his brain was losing the argument.

Tristan frowned. "Lucian. Did the shots hit you wrong? You look like you swallowed a live fish."

Lucian didn’t answer.

Tristan’s frown deepened. Then dissolved entirely, because his eyes left Lucian’s face and found the corridor entrance, and the woman standing there emptied his mind of every thought he had ever had or would ever have.

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