The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 374

Chapter 374: Unlikable Was A War Cry Now

Agnes’s body went rigid.

She stopped breathing. Her fingers locked into the stone with a grip that was fueled entirely by adrenaline and the understanding that being discovered on a wall outside a second-story window would add "caught eavesdropping during escape attempt" to the résumé the stranger had just finished reciting.

Corvin reached the window. His hand appeared on the sill. His face was three feet from hers, separated by a wall and an angle and the dense winter darkness that was, for the first time in this entire escape, doing her a favor.

He looked out. His eyes swept the grounds below. He breathed the cold air once, the way a man breathes cold air when a room is stuffy and the night is available.

Agnes was frozen. Flat against the stone. Her face turned away from the window. Her body pressed into the wall with the specific intensity of a woman attempting to become architecture.

Her fingers were white. Her arms were shaking. A single cough, a single shifted stone, a single sound louder than her own heartbeat, and the man three feet away would look left instead of down and the escape would end on a wall.

Corvin pulled the window shut.

The latch clicked. The light narrowed to nothing. The voices became muffled, then inaudible, and the wall was dark and cold and silent.

Agnes exhaled. The exhale was long, shaking, carrying the compressed terror of the last forty-five seconds in a single breath that fogged in the winter air and drifted away from the wall like a ghost with better things to do.

"Unlikable by design," she muttered through her teeth. "I will remember that. I will remember your voice.

And when Garrett and I are sitting on a throne you will never touch, I am going to find you, and I am going to make you say it to my face, and then I am going to destroy you with a smile."

She resumed climbing.

The last story and a half was graceless. The handholds ran out at the first-story mark, where the stone transitioned from rough-cut masonry to a smooth foundation that offered the grip of a wet mirror.

Agnes hung from the last viable foothold for three seconds, calculating the drop, calculating the landing surface, calculating the odds that a ten-foot fall onto packed earth would cause damage to the thing below her ribs that she was contractually obligated to protect.

She let go.

The landing was controlled in the sense that she aimed for the ground and successfully reached it. The execution involved her feet hitting the earth, her knees buckling, her body pitching forward, and her hands catching her weight in a position that any observer would have described as "face-first controlled collapse" and any gymnast would have scored a two.

She lay on the frozen ground for three seconds. Her wrists burned. Her knees ached. Her dress was torn at the hem, her lip was still bleeding, and the cold was so total that her body had stopped registering it as temperature and had begun categorizing it as a personality.

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