The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 349

Chapter 349: A Prince Who Should’ve Been Dead

River felt it.

She was holding Tristan’s hand, when something tore through her chest so violently she screamed.

Her hand flew to her heart. Her pink eyes flared, the magic surging in response to a grief she couldn’t name yet, a loss she couldn’t identify yet, a severing she couldn’t see but could feel in every cell of her body.

Atlas’s Fae blood-sense had tied him to her the day he signed the adoption decree. The connection flowed both ways. She had felt his emotions for twelve years as any fae daughter could with her father.

It became a quiet presence in the back of her awareness, the steady, warm signal of a father who was always there even when he was miles away.

The signal went dark.

"Father." The word came out of her at a whisper. Then louder. "Father."

She was running before the healers could stop her. Through the corridor, through the great hall, toward the eastern gate, because the signal had been coming from the east and the signal was gone and the absence of it was an answer she refused to accept.

✦✦✦

Tristan was already moving.

The prince who had been dying in a bed five minutes ago was on his feet, dark veins covering half his face, his magic unstable and dangerous and eating him alive, and none of it mattered because a messenger had just arrived at the healer’s wing with blood on his boots and the particular expression of a man carrying news that would end a kingdom.

"The King has fallen under a false parley. General Willow’s forces hold the eastern field."

Tristan heard the words. The words rearranged the world.

His Fae combat armor formed around him through sheer force of will, the magic answering his fury even as it consumed his body, gold and white plating materializing across his shoulders, his arms, his chest.

The full ceremonial battle raiment of the Prince of All Fae was worn in this moment by a man whose veins were black and whose eyes were gray and whose father was dead on a field that should have been sacred.

He moved toward the eastern gate at a speed that should have killed him.

Halfway there, a guard intercepted him. The guard’s face was white.

"Your Highness. The princess. She left through the eastern gate ten minutes ago. She was running toward the field."

The sound that came out of Tristan Aelindor was beyond language.

✦✦✦

THE EASTERN GATE

Lucian Moon arrived with three hundred wolves.

He rode south on instinct alone, the wolf inside him screaming a warning he couldn’t articulate, a pull toward Aelindris so violent it had overridden every obligation his kingdom demanded. His battalion was behind him, running in wolf form, covering ground at a pace that only wolves driven by their Alpha’s desperation could sustain.

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