The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 547

Chapter 547: Special Delivery From Volcano Vacation Island

The lake won.

Gavriel had eleven seconds of consciousness left. He spent ten of them trying to reach her before tentacles erupted around him.

These were thicker. Armored. Barbed with ridges that cut into his skin on contact. One slammed around his torso, spikes cutting through his flesh, and squeezed hard enough to crack ribs and knock the remaining air from his lungs in a single, devastating compression.

Another wrapped his leg and yanked downward, reversing his momentum in an instant. A third coiled around his throat and tightened with the slow, deliberate pressure of a creature that understood anatomy and was applying force to the exact spot where it would do the most damage.

White spots burst across Gavriel’s vision.

His lungs screamed for air that didn’t exist. His fingers went numb, the cold and the pressure and the lack of oxygen collaborating on a shutdown his body was losing the vote against. The tentacle around his throat pulsed like a vise, each pulse tighter than the last, and the edges of his consciousness began to darken.

He tried to slash. His arm jerked backward as another tentacle clamped around his wrist, pinning the sword at an angle that made it useless. Four limbs restrained. Throat closing. Vision tunneling.

He couldn’t move.

He couldn’t see Serena anymore. The darkness had taken her, and the matebond was delivering her fear and pain in waves that were getting weaker, which was worse than the waves getting stronger, because weaker meant she was fading.

He fought. Thrashed. Strained against the tentacles with every muscle he owned, desperate to break free, desperate to reach her, desperate with the specific desperation of a man who had just mated this woman hours ago and was about to lose her at the bottom of a lake he shouldn’t have let them enter.

Another tentacle shot from the darkness.

This one was different. Thin. Needle-sharp. Moving with the targeted velocity of a weapon, and it punched straight through his chest.

His entire body seized.

Vision exploded white. A wet, choking sound escaped his throat, underwater. It was half blood and half the last air his lungs would ever hold, and the pain was so absolute and so total that it overrode every other sensation including the matebond, including the fear, including the green magic that flickered and died around him like a candle in a hurricane.

The creature dragged him downward. Pressure crushed in from every side. His vision went from white to black to nothing.

Then his bracelet vibrated.

The thin gold band on his wrist, the one that hadn’t worked in the temple, the one he’d stared at while Serena was unconscious and willed to activate and watched sit silent and useless on his arm, woke up. Magic detonated outward from the Aureus Catenes cuff in a pulse that hit his own green magic like a whip, the two frequencies colliding with a force that was violent and absolute and completely uninterested in the tentacles’ opinions on the matter.

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