The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 553

Chapter 553: Everybody Stare At Gavriel

They crossed the bridge in a blur.

Fin’s boots hit the rocky shore and he was already dropping, already lowering, already moving with the frantic economy of a man operating on terror and training in equal measure.

He placed her flat on the volcanic stone, hands trembling as he positioned them over her sternum. His fingers interlocked, arms locked straight, shoulders stacked directly above his wrists the way every warrior was taught in field medic drills that nobody ever wanted to use.

Her skin was too pale. Her lashes were wet and her chest was still.

"She’s breathing, right?" Gavriel rasped from behind him, and the crack in his voice answered the question before Fin did.

"She’s not," Fin said, and the words came out broken, fractured down the middle, held together by nothing except the fact that his hands were already moving.

He started compressions. Sharp. Powerful. Rhythmic. His palms were driving down in steady, controlled pumps meant to force her heart to remember what it was supposed to be doing, meant to bully her lungs into accepting air they’d forgotten how to process.

Each push sent a shudder through him that had nothing to do with the cold.

"Come on, baby..."

Another push. Another.

Gavriel watched the man he’d been resenting pour everything he had into the chest of the woman they both loved, and the resentment died so quietly he didn’t notice it leave.

Fin’s compressions were perfect. His face was not. Tears were running down his jaw and landing on her chest between pumps and he wasn’t wiping them because wiping them would mean releasing the rhythm and the rhythm was the only thing standing between her and a word he would not say, would not think, would not allow to exist in any language in any world while his hands were still moving.

"You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to fucking do this, Serena."

Another push.

Gavriel dropped beside him. His hand found hers and held it the way a man holds a rope over a cliff, with everything he had and the understanding that letting go was the same as falling. Green light was leaking from his hands without his permission, flowing into her skin, finding her ribs, wrapping around her lungs like hands trying to physically open them from the inside.

"Come on, Frostborne."

His magic had decided that if her body wouldn’t breathe on its own, it would breathe for her, and the magic didn’t care that Gavriel was crying or that his chest wound was bleeding through the wraps or that the man beside him was slamming her heart back to life with the controlled violence of a lover who refused to grieve.

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