The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 542

Chapter 542: Mindfuck At Maximum Depth

The ice gave way beneath them like a trapdoor, and the lake swallowed them whole.

The cold hit like a wall of knives. Freezing, instant, the kind of cold that bypassed the nervous system entirely and went straight to the bone, the kind that should have locked every muscle in his body and started the countdown to hypothermia in under sixty seconds.

Gavriel’s body glowed green.

The magic erupted from his skin brighter than before, a full-body shield of emerald light that wrapped him in warmth so total the cold couldn’t touch him. It snapped around Serena in the same instant, the green energy reaching for her before he consciously decided to extend it, his magic treating her protection as a default setting that didn’t require input from his brain.

Serena blinked underwater, stunned.

She didn’t need to shield him. His body was protecting itself without any effort from her, the green magic humming at a frequency that repelled the freezing water the way her gold magic repelled dark magic, instinctively and absolutely. And he wasn’t just protecting himself. He was protecting her too, his magic wrapping her like a second skin, and she could feel through the Fae frequency that his reserves weren’t even straining. He was running at idle. Barely a ripple in the ocean she’d felt during the parachute.

His magic didn’t want her to use hers. She could feel that intention radiating through the matebond and the Fae connection simultaneously, a wordless insistence that she conserve, that she rest, that she let him carry this one, and she was grateful for it because this was the kind of cold that would’ve cost her dearly and her reserves were still recharging from the cave.

She reached outward with her senses, feeling for what she always felt for in deep water near volcanic stone.

Velkaris’s flame found her first. Distant, steady, burning gold somewhere far above them, her dragon’s presence a warm constant she could locate the way a sailor locates north. He was alive. He was waiting. He was pissed, probably, because Velkaris was always pissed when she went underground without him.

Then she felt a second flame.

It was smaller. Younger. Green.

She knew this flame the way you know a song you’ve heard once and can’t forget, recognized it in her marrow before her mind caught up with her instinct. The juvenile dragon. The one that had ripped through a portal at terminal velocity with the landing skills of a drunk pelican and interrupted Guinevere Ashford’s execution.

The little guy who breathed fire that was supposed to be a myth.

She hadn’t met him yet. She’d planned to, had put it on the growing list of things she needed to do when the world stopped trying to kill everyone she cared about for five consecutive minutes, a list that was getting longer faster than she could check things off.

But she could feel him now, his flame burning green and bright and eager somewhere in the dark, and her Fae magic reached for it the way it had reached for Gavriel’s, with the immediate, instinctive recognition of something that belonged to the same frequency she did.

The rope kept pulling.

Deeper. Faster. The kind of descent that stopped being a swim and started being a sentence, the water above them sealing shut like a door that had no intention of reopening. Pressure squeezed their ribs, compressing their chests inch by inch as the depth increased, and their ears popped with a pain that traveled through their skulls and settled behind their eyes.

The cold grew vicious. The silence became unnatural, the kind of silence that belonged to places where sound went to die, where the only thing audible was the blood in your own head and the grinding protest of a body being dragged somewhere bodies weren’t designed to go.

The rope didn’t care. The rope had an appointment at the bottom and was running ahead of schedule.

Next to her, Gavriel felt his Hidden Flame mark burn. The heat ignited beneath his skin like a pilot light flaring to full blaze, and a half-second later, the echo hit him. Hers.

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