The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 430

Chapter 430: Expected A Noblewoman. Got A Bitch.

The mage blinked. His ambush script had been interrupted by a monologue he had failed to anticipate.

"I have been to an orphanage, sir. An ORPHANAGE. I held children I did not know. I was touched without permission by at least four of them simultaneously. I funded a roof. I watched two dragons I stole from the military get more affection in two hours than my husband has given me in thirty years. I listened to a thirteen-year-old girl tell me I am insane, and I agreed with her, because she was correct, and the correctness was more useful than anything my husband has said to me in a decade."

She took another step forward.

"And now you. In your cloak. With your smoke. On my road. On the one afternoon I leave the castle to do a single generous thing for another human being, a thing I am doing for strategic purposes but a generous thing nonetheless, and I am stopped by a man who thinks dark fog is a personality."

The coachman, Ronald, was witnessing the Queen of Drakenfell dress down a dark mage the way she dressed down household staff, and the mage was handling it about as well as the household staff did, which was to say not at goddamn all.

"You are going to make me shift," Bellatrix snapped. She had arrived at a solution she found personally inconvenient. "I have been avoiding this. I have a beautiful dress on. My hair took forty minutes this morning. My wolf has been sitting in my chest for years doing absolutely nothing because I am a queen and queens do not run in forests."

The fact that she was announcing her shift before executing it, giving the enemy a full tactical preview of her intentions, was either the dumbest thing she had ever done or the most Bellatrix thing she had ever done, and the Venn diagram between those two was a fucking circle.

The mage raised his hand. Dark energy crackled across his fingers, the visual signature of a spell being prepared. A threatening display that usually made people scream. He was accustomed to threats producing compliance and was currently getting the opposite.

"I am about to ruin this man’s entire afternoon."

Bellatrix Drakenfell shifted.

The shift was fast. Faster than the mage expected, faster than the coachman expected, faster than any person on the road expected, because Bellatrix had been an Alpha’s wife for thirty years and the mark on her neck carried venom that kept her wolf in peak condition regardless of how rarely she was released, and the wolf that had been sitting in her chest for years doing nothing had been sitting there ready and the readiness was about to become extremely apparent.

A dark purple wolf stood on the eastern road.

The mage’s spell died on his fingertips. His jaw fell down, because he’d never seen a purple wolf before.

Brown was the most common, then grey. Black was rare. Purple was rarer. It was the color of old bloodlines, ancient magic, the specific genetic marker of a lineage that predated the modern packs and carried a resonance that most wolves had forgotten existed.

The wolf was large. Significantly larger than her human frame suggested. He had ambushed a carriage expecting a screaming noblewoman and gotten a goddamn mythological creature instead.

"That is a—" the mage started.

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