The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 484

Chapter 484: Fin Was NICE To Gavriel? (Aeron Blinked)

"Alaric cleared me. Relax."

"He cleared you for light training."

"Yes, and?"

"This is a combat. Identify the part of that sentence that qualifies as light."

"The part where I let everyone else do the heavy lifting." Gavriel spread his hands. "I’m logistics. I’m the compass. I stand in the back and look pretty. Lightest duty on the roster."

While this was happening, Dex and Fin both stiffened.

The stiffening was subtle, simultaneous, and aimed at the same target, which was Serena, whose emotional output had just spiked through both matebonds with a frequency that the necklace was dampening but could not entirely suppress. Both Alphas received the spike through the fog: anxiety.

Sharp. Directed. Carrying the specific texture of a woman who was worried about a person in this room and whose worry was producing a physical response she was trying to hide.

Both of them looked at Gavriel.

Both of them arrived at the same conclusion through different routes: she was worried about him. The man had just come out of a coma and was volunteering for a mission that had historically produced injuries, near-death experiences, and multiple spike stabbings.

She was worried he would get hurt. She was worried because she cared about him and caring about people who had recently been dying was a reasonable emotional response and the response was producing anxiety and the anxiety was leaking through the necklace’s dampening.

That was the obvious explanation. Both Alphas selected it.

"Gav, are you sure?" Dexmon’s voice carried genuine concern. "Maybe you should sit this one out. We just got you back."

"Agreed," Fin said. The agreement was immediate, natural, carrying zero of the adversarial energy that historically defined his interactions with Gavriel Sterling. "We’ll manage without you. Go relax and get some rest."

Aeron blinked.

The blinking was the blinking of a Master Mage whose Alpha had just expressed genuine, unprompted concern for the Gamma of Drakenfell, a man his Alpha had been, by Aeron’s calculation, barely tolerating for weeks.

Aeron had witnessed the tension between Fin and Gavriel firsthand. He had catalogued the jaw-clenching, the measured distance, the specific temperature of two men who occupied adjacent orbits around the same woman and whose adjacency produced friction that was managed rather than resolved.

Fin had just said "we’ll manage without you" and "go relax and get some rest" in the same breath, and the breath had been warm, and the warm was baffling, and the baffling was producing a recalibration in Aeron’s understanding of inter-pack dynamics that was going to require additional data.

"I’m the only member of this team who walked out of that lake without a scratch last time," Gavriel pointed out. "Every single one of you got hit. Dex took spikes and was trapped. Fin bled from three places I could count and probably four I couldn’t." He looked around the room. "I carried two of you out. And I did it while cracking jokes because the jokes were the only thing keeping the morale from hitting the goddamn floor."

He crossed his arms. "So respectfully, to both Alphas who are very kind right now and I appreciate it: I am going. This task was given to me by possessed Serena and I have been on every single mission."

Silence.

"He has a point," Maelor said from the bookshelf, inspecting a vial and not looking up. "He was, regrettably, the least injured among us. Which is either a testament to his skill or a commentary on the rest of ours, and I choose to find neither option acceptable."

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