The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 539

Chapter 539: I Knew This Was Coming And STILL

Gavriel stepped forward, looked down, and every muscle in his body locked.

A crater yawned beneath them, ten miles across if he was being generous with his spatial reasoning and conservative with his terror. The interior was carved into a colossal bowl of black obsidian, smooth and ancient and so impossibly deep that the bottom looked like it belonged in a different time.

Cooled lava ridges ringed the walls in concentric shelves, and the scale of the thing made him feel like a man standing on the lip of a soup bowl for the gods.

At its center sat a lake.

Black. Massive. Still as glass, except for the ice that was spider-webbing across its surface in real time, crystalline fractals racing outward from the center like the lake was freezing itself while they watched, sealing over with the slow, deliberate patience of something that wanted to be found before it finished closing.

Serena turned to him and flashed a grin. "Do you trust me?"

"Yes," he answered, without hesitation, without thought, without the half-second pause that self-preservation usually demanded before agreeing to anything Serena Frostborne proposed while standing on the edge of a cliff. The matebond carried his answer before his mouth did. She felt it land, and the warmth that came back through the connection was worth the fall that was about to follow.

She grabbed his hand.

Two facts competed for dominance in Gavriel Sterling’s mind as he stared into the volcanic abyss: first, that whatever lived at the bottom of this thing was ancient, dangerous, and probably hungry. Second, that Serena’s hand was in his, and he would walk into every single one of those things smiling if she asked him to. She asked.

She sprinted straight off the rim, him next to her and they plummeted.

Volcanic wind screamed past them as the crater swallowed them whole, the obsidian walls blurring into a dark smear on either side, the black lake growing from a distant coin to a goddamn continent in the space of three heartbeats.

Gavriel’s stomach relocated to his throat and set up permanent residence, his body registering freefall with the enthusiasm of a man who had been thrown off things before and never once enjoyed the experience.

"FUCKING HELL, SERENA! I KNEW THIS WAS COMING AND I STILL—"

Serena wrapped herself around him mid-air, arms locking around his shoulders, legs around his waist, her body pressed flush against his.

A massive pink parachute burst into existence above them, transparent and glowing pink, blooming outward like a flower made of light. It caught the air instantly, their descent yanking from terminal velocity to a controlled drift in a single rippling pulse of Fae magic that snapped his spine straight and rattled his teeth.

Then his body glowed green.

The green light erupted from his skin without warning, without intention, without him doing a single conscious thing to summon it. It surrounded Serena in the same breath, wrapping around her and her pink parachute in a cocoon of emerald energy that was so much stronger than what she’d produced that the comparison felt like putting a candle next to a bonfire.

Her pink parachute dissolved. Vanished. Replaced entirely by his magic, which held them aloft with an effortless buoyancy that felt, to Gavriel, like barely flexing a muscle he’d just discovered.

The sensation was unlike anything he had ever experienced, power flowing from a reservoir so deep he couldn’t feel the bottom of it. Whatever lived inside him was vast and what he was using right now felt like skimming the surface with a fingertip. A ripple in an ocean that stretched farther than his awareness could reach.

This time, Serena’s mouth dropped open.

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