The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 356

Chapter 356: He Said Watch Me

She was waiting for the man she had just openly defied to tell her there would be consequences. Gavriel could feel it. He could feel everything she was feeling, which he assumed was because Tristan was bonded with her.

Tristan didn’t stop until they were in their quarters. He set her down on the ottoman gently. The way you set down something precious that you are afraid of breaking, which was an accurate description of the woman sitting in front of him, because she looked, in this moment, like she was already broken and was holding the pieces together through willpower alone.

Tristan knelt in front of her, dropping to his knees. Both of his arms locked around her waist and held her.

"Baby." His voice was low and steady. "You do not need to worry. I am going to tell you something, and I need you to hear it."

River’s hands stayed in her lap. Her tears fell on his forearms.

"There is no version of this where I go with her." His arms tightened. "I do not care if every Fae in Aelindris lines up at our door and tells me I must. The answer is you. It has always been you. It will always be you. I love you, River."

The words should have fixed it. In any other version of this moment, in any timeline where River hadn’t watched him die with a spear through his chest and a smile on his face, the words would have landed on her grief and dissolved it and she would have buried her face in his neck and believed him.

She couldn’t.

Because she had believed him before. She had believed him in a healer’s wing while dark veins crawled up his neck. She had believed him when he said he would rather die chosen than live with a woman he never wanted. She had believed every word, and every word had been true, and he had died anyway.

"Tristan." Her voice was so small it barely reached him, even at this distance. "There has never been a king in the recorded history of Fae who has gone against a fated tie. This is what the Moon Goddess chose for you." She swallowed. The swallow was audible. "I love you. I will love you for the rest of my life. But I will never be the obstacle between you and what fate intended."

"You are my fate. I made you my fate. With my own hands—"

She shook her head.

The motion was small, definitive, the particular headshake of a woman who had been given the clearest possible preview of where this road ended and was refusing to walk it again, regardless of the fact that every cell in her body was screaming at her to say yes and hold on and let him fight and trust him the way she had always trusted him.

She couldn’t because she had seen the outcome. The outcome was a king dead under parley and his son impaled next to him.

Tristan tried again. "River, listen to me—"

"Please." The word cracked. "Please do not make this harder."

His jaw worked. His arms were still around her. He could feel her grief, her resolve, her love, her goodbye, all of it contradicting each other.

He didn’t accept it.

"I hear you," he said, and his voice was low, measured, the voice of a man choosing his words with the precision of a commander selecting terrain. "I hear what you are saying, and I understand that you believe it. But you are wrong, River, and I will spend every day I have left proving it."

"Tristan—"

"You asked me to hear you. I did. Now hear me." He pulled back enough to look at her. "I will handle the elders. I will handle Vesper. I will handle every Fae in this realm who thinks they can tell me who my soul belongs to, because my soul decided that a long time ago, on a wall, and my soul has never once been wrong."

"You cannot fight fate."

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