The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 483

Chapter 483: Touch Nothing, Serena

"Before we begin," Hyran said, looking up from his desk and fixing Serena with the level gaze of a mage whose patience for near-death experiences had been exhausted several missions ago, "let’s establish some ground rules for this retrieval."

Serena looked at him.

"Rule one. We are going to attempt, with whatever collective discipline this group can muster, to complete an artifact retrieval without any member of this team being stabbed, impaled, speared, or penetrated by any object that is sharper than a dinner knife."

"That seems reasonable," Serena said.

"It seemed reasonable last time too, and you were stabbed. In a lake. With spikes. While I watched." Hyran’s voice carried the specific irritation of a man whose protégé kept almost dying in bodies of water. "I am done watching you get stabbed, Serena and I am done with lakes entirely. If this artifact is near a lake, I am vetoing the lake."

"Didn’t the ancestors say there would be another lake?" Serena asked. It was rhetorical because the answer was yes.

Aeron cleared his throat. "I would like to second the no-stabbing rule and extend it to include all edged weapons, projectiles, and environmental hazards including but not limited to collapsing structures, dark magic traps, and ancient defense mechanisms triggered by someone touching something they were explicitly told to leave alone."

He looked at Serena when he said the last part.

"I only touched it once," Serena said.

"You touched a warded artifact in a sealed chamber that had been locked for three centuries and the touching activated a defense system that nearly killed four people."

"But it didn’t."

"’But it didn’t’ is the battle cry of a woman whose survival strategy is retroactive luck, and retroactive luck is a finite resource, Serena." Aeron’s voice was steady but his eyes were carrying the specific exasperation of a Beta who had been assigned to protect a woman whose self-preservation instincts operated on a delay.

Dex and Fin reacted identically. Both jaws locked. Both sets of eyes went flat. Both men received Aeron’s recap of Serena’s near-death history through the filter of Alphas whose mates had been referenced in proximity to the word "died" and whose response to that proximity was a synchronized shutdown of all facial expression that communicated "we are listening and we are memorizing and the memorizing is producing a list of safety protocols that will be enforced unilaterally."

Neither of them found it funny. The identical not-finding-it-funny was becoming a trademark.

Hyran was about to continue when the study door opened.

Gavriel Sterling walked in.

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