The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 363

Chapter 363: Wolf Hearing Didn’t Ask Permission

TRISTAN’S QUARTERS

Lucian’s footsteps paused outside their door, briefing scroll in hand. Wolf hearing didn’t ask permission. He heard enough. He left before he heard more.

The briefing could wait. The words behind that door could not, and they weren’t his to hear, and hearing them anyway was a punishment his loyalty had earned and his heart hadn’t.

"You can’t keep doing this, Tristan."

River was sitting on a chair by the fire.

"Doing what?"

"Pulling things from her. The public corrections. Every time you take something from Vesper, every time you fight the fated tie, I feel it."

He turned. "Feel what?"

"Darkness." She said it quietly. The way she said things that scared her. "Inside you. Growing. Every time you reject her, every time you force the bond backward, something in you gets darker. I can sense it, Tristan. It’s cold. It wasn’t there before."

His jaw tightened. "She disrespected you in front of the entire court."

"And you corrected it. And I love you for it. And it cost you something you’re not telling me about." She held his gaze. "I need you to try. Whatever the elders suggested about managing the tie, whatever the priestess recommended, I need you to try it. Because I would rather sit three rows back for the rest of my life than watch the darkness eat you alive."

He crossed the room. Knelt in front of her. Took both her hands.

"There is no version of any morning, in any life, where I wake up and do not think of you first." His voice was raw. Stripped of the prince and the commander and the wit he wore over everything. "You are the first thought I have ever had that I did not choose. You were there before I opened my eyes, every day, since I was twelve years old. The darkness can have whatever it wants from me, River. It cannot have that."

Her chin trembled. The thing it did.

"No, Tristan. I need you to actually try. Stop destroying yourself and give your fated tie an actual chance. Please, do it for me."

His forehead dropped to their joined hands. He stayed there. Breathing. Holding on.

"I’ll try," he said. "I will try. But I need you to understand that trying means tolerating a woman who isn’t you. Every second of that tolerance will be the hardest thing I’ve ever done."

✦✦✦

The torches along the colonnade shifted from gold to pale pink as River walked past, her magic bleeding into the architecture without her permission.

Starlight filtered through the open ceiling of the assembly hall, bending around the pillars in angles.

Vesper sat in the chair beside Tristan’s. The chair that had been River’s. The arrangement was protocol, mandated by the elders as part of the fated tie formalization, and the mandate was correct, and the correctness was a weapon Vesper wielded with the precision of a woman who understood that the most devastating attacks are the ones sanctioned by authority.

River sat three rows back. Her hands were in her lap. Her back was straight. Her eyes were on the floor.

Tristan entered the room four minutes late, which was unusual, because Tristan Aelindor had never been late to anything in his life and treated punctuality as a personality trait.

He scanned the room, then stopped walking.

The room noticed. Three hundred faces tracked the prince as he stood in the center aisle, looking at the chair beside his throne, then at the woman sitting in it, then at the woman three rows back who was pretending the floor was the most fascinating surface in the kingdom.

"Move," Tristan said to Vesper.

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