The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 497

Chapter 497: Yield Can Kiss My Ass

The six of them had blades pressed to their throats while Serena was on her back, a disgusting vampire standing over her producing a shadow that smelled like a thousand-year-old corpse had gargled sulfur and lost.

"I am King of the Night Throne and you shall yield."

"Creative," Serena said. "Did you come up with that yourself?"

The King blinked. The blinking was the blinking of a creature who had been delivering that line for ten thousand years and had never once received editorial feedback.

"You will yield to me, Moon Princess."

"You already said that. The repetition isn’t strengthening the pitch."

His jaw twitched. The twitching was unprecedented. Ancient vampire kings did not receive notes on their monologues from women lying in dirt.

"I have waited ten millennia—"

"Ten millennia and that’s the opener?" Serena’s voice was flat. Conversational. The voice of a woman lying on her back in a jungle surrounded by undead predators and choosing to critique the delivery. "Yield is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. You might want to workshop it."

"SILENCE."

"See, that one’s better. Direct. Punchy. Lead with that next time."

His jaw unhinged. The triple row of fangs extended. The threat was clear, ancient, and entirely wasted on a woman whose survival instincts were currently being overridden by the compulsive need to tell this dude to fuck off.

She used this second to shove flame into everyone immediately with everything she had. Her heart was pounding. Her hand shot up, aimed directly at the vampire standing over her.

"Stop with the flame," the vampire commanded before any flame came.

Her hand fell, and the flame she had been pushing into everyone stopped.

The vampires who had started to burn a moment prior went still. A few laughed as their bodies regenerated tissue. The laughing was the laughing of creatures who had been on fire and found the experience amusing, and the amusing was the most disturbing sound any of them had heard today, which was saying something, because today had included a screaming severed head.

The King hunched over her, fangs out.

Fin roared, lunging, but the blade at his throat bit down. "GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM HER!"

His voice was pure Alpha command. Every wolf in formation felt the frequency in their bones. The vampires felt nothing. Alpha command bounced off the undead the way sunlight bounced off the dead, which was to say: completely, uselessly, and with zero fucking effect.

The King’s head turned toward Fin with the slow, theatrical rotation of a creature whose patience had expired three centuries before anyone in this clearing was born.

"I said quiet!"

SLICE.

The blade moved.

In one brutal move, a vampire slit Finnick Shadowclaw’s throat open.

Or so that’s what should have happened.

But before steel could kiss skin, Fin vanished.

Gone. Erased from the jungle floor mid-execution, his body vanished so fast the vampire holding the blade stumbled forward into empty air and nearly stabbed itself in the thigh.

The gold bracelets on all seven of them vibrated.

Aureus Catenes cuffs. They wore them so they could all mindlink because Fin, Aeron, and Maelor belonged to different packs. None of them expected the cuffs to work. Mindlink didn’t function at all in the Temple of Vyramar, and the cuffs didn’t activate when Dexmon and Fin were dying under the surface of the lake.

But they were in the jungle, not a temple, and the cuffs worked. A failsafe that had just ripped an Alpha King out of a death strike and deposited him elsewhere entirely.

✦✦✦

Fin: Serena.

Fin: Aeron. Dexmon. Can anyone hear me?

Xeon: It put us in timeout.

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