The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 598

Chapter 598: When The Draken Prime Goes Missing

The six dragons folded into formation around Velkaris like an escort falling into step.

No riders. Six wild dragons flanking a seventh like a military detail that had been summoned by something older than orders. Two on each side, one above, one below, their wingbeats synchronized with Velkaris’s in a rhythm that looked choreographed but felt instinctual.

Velkaris grumbled at them.

It wasn’t the polite kind. Serena could feel his irritation bleeding through their connection like heat through thin glass, a low, simmering annoyance that said he hadn’t asked for company and he wasn’t grateful for it. One of the flanking dragons, a deep bronze, drifted closer, and Velkaris snapped something at it that made the bronze pull back two wingspans immediately.

Whatever they were saying to him, he didn’t like it. Whatever he was saying back, he liked even less.

Her eyes closed.

She didn’t let go of Charlie. Her arms had locked into position somewhere over Viremont and the muscles had seized there, frozen into a grip that her body was maintaining on principle because her brain had left the building. Charlie’s heartbeat was still there, faint and stubborn against her forearm, and she counted it the way a drowning person counts breaths: one at a time, each one a small miracle she refused to take for granted.

She wasn’t sure how much time passed.

Minutes. Hours. The dark behind her eyelids shifted from black to gray to a warm amber that pressed against her closed lids like a hand on a door. She opened her eyes and the sun was bleeding over the horizon, spilling gold across the clouds beneath them, turning the six dragons around her into burnished silhouettes edged in fire.

She was still here. Charlie was still breathing. Both of those things felt like accidents she’d gotten away with.

Then she saw more dragons ahead.

A cluster of them, hovering at the edge of the sunrise like a wall built out of wings and scales. The six around her tightened formation. Velkaris didn’t slow down.

The cluster moved.

She wasn’t ready for it.

They split and dove with a speed that made the escort dragons look lazy, peeling apart and converging on Velkaris from three directions simultaneously, and before her blood-drowned eye could track what was happening, something landed on Velkaris’s back behind her with the graceless thud of a man who had jumped from one dragon to another without waiting for an invitation.

Dexmon.

She knew before she turned around. She knew because Velkaris’s grumbling shifted from annoyed-at-strangers to annoyed-at-family, the specific, long-suffering vibration of a dragon whose bonded rider had been screaming at him through their connection for the last several hours and had finally gotten close enough to do it in person.

Velkaris huffed. The huff translated roughly to: I heard you the first four hundred times.

Serena blinked. Once. Twice. Three times, trying to clear the red from her left eye, trying to make the shape behind her resolve into something her broken vision could confirm.

Dexmon’s arms came around her and pulled her back against his chest. The contact was immediate, solid, warm in a way that had nothing to do with Velkaris’s heat. His heart was hammering against her spine. His breathing wasn’t steady. Nothing about him was steady, but his hands were sure when they settled on her, one across her collarbone, one braced against her ribs like he was holding her skeleton together through the skin.

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