The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 511

Chapter 511: Never Again Has A Half-Life

Hyran, Gavriel, Fin, Maelor, and Aeron stumbled out of the nightmare tunnel, singed, panting, and looking like they’d survived fourteen separate exorcisms.

Maelor’s robes had crossed from ’ruined’ into ’conceptual art.’ Hyran’s hair was standing in three directions that hair should never stand. Aeron’s thermal weave suit had a handprint burned into the shoulder that he was choosing to examine later. Gavriel’s entire left side was coated in a substance that was either ash, stone infant residue, or liquified ghost, and the identification was a project he was declining to undertake.

The second Fin saw Serena hiccuping, eyes red, his heart cracked clean open. He crossed the distance without thinking and pulled her into his arms. His grip was tight. Too tight for public, too tight for protocol, too tight for an Alpha King in the presence of his entire team. He didn’t care. The caring had been left somewhere in the corridor behind him, between the stone infants and the doppelganger wearing his face, and the caring was never coming back.

Dexmon didn’t react to it. He and Fin locked eyes over her head. Silent communication. The communication lasted one second and contained an entire debrief.

Fin already knew this was nobody’s cup of tea. He was just as relieved to be out of that place and understood her state completely. His relief bled straight into her through their matebond. The relief hit her and her shoulders dropped two inches, the tension releasing from muscles that had been locked for over an hour, and the releasing produced a fresh round of hiccups that she buried against Fin’s chest.

Gavriel stepped closer, eyes softening with genuine worry. "You alright there, Serena?"

Serena didn’t trust herself to speak yet. Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. The words were there but the delivery system was compromised and the compromised was producing nothing but air and the occasional hiccup.

"She’s okay," Dexmon answered for her. "Just fought off ancient tendrils, survived psychological warfare from a corridor that read her memories, and stabbed a wall with an arrow. Standard stuff."

"That is a concerning baseline," Aeron said.

"She didn’t cry on me at all. Not even a little," Dex added playfully.

Serena laughed, shaking her head. The laugh was watery, fragile, held together by the sheer stubbornness of a woman who had been crying for the last hour and was choosing to stop because her team was here.

Hyran braced his hands on his knees.

"Let it be known," he wheezed, "that if anyone ever asks us to walk through that tunnel again, I am faking my own death. I will stage the funeral. I will write the eulogy. I will lie in the coffin and I will STAY there."

Aeron nodded, hair wild, face pale. "That tunnel can get absolutely fucked."

"With respect," Maelor added, still breathing hard, "and I say this as a scholar who values architectural history: that tunnel can get fucked with ZERO respect. I retract the respect. The tunnel does not deserve respect. The tunnel deserves to be filled with cement and forgotten."

Gavriel looked at Dex. Dex looked at Gavriel. The look was the look. The one they’d been exchanging since they were fourteen. The look that contained an entire conversation built on the foundation of mutual survival and whose foundation was producing a very specific impulse.

"So," Gavriel said, "scale of one to ten, how pissed would Serena be if we told everyone she screamed so loud the corridor flinched?"

"She’d kill us," Dex said.

"Immediately," Gavriel agreed.

"With arrows."

"The special arrows. The ones that turn things to ash."

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