The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 599

Chapter 599: Before Serena, There Was Natalia

"M-missing?"

"Yes. Ronan came looking for you."

"Ronan?"

"Yes."

He did not elaborate. The silence after the confirmation had the energy of a door being closed on a room she wasn’t invited into yet.

She swallowed. The gold magic was still working through her ribs, knitting things she’d torn open in Viremont, and the warmth of it made it hard to think clearly, but guilt was cutting through regardless.

"I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cause you to worry," she managed.

Dexmon’s arms tightened around her. She felt him inhale against her hair, deep and slow, the way someone breathes in a scent they’ve been missing for longer than a single lifetime.

"Natalia was my name in a past life. Wasn’t it?" Serena asked.

She didn’t know how she knew. The knowledge was just there, sitting in her chest like a coin she’d found in a pocket she didn’t remember filling. She wanted him to say it. Needed the confirmation from a voice that had no reason to lie.

"Yes."

The word was simple. The weight of it was not.

Serena swallowed and leaned back into him, just a fraction, just enough to let his chest take some of the weight her spine had been carrying alone. His magic was still flowing, golden and steady, threading through Charlie’s failing body like stitches in a wound.

"You were upset. You still are. Why?"

The directness almost took her aback. No preamble. No easing into it. He asked the way someone asks who has been alive long enough to find small talk insulting.

But the truth was immediate. "This man saved my life and I can feel his heart stuttering."

"He won’t die. I am holding him until your healers see him."

"Thank you," she said. She could feel his magic doing exactly that, could feel the golden current wrapped around Charlie’s pulse like a hand keeping a door from closing. But hearing him say it loosened something in her chest that feeling it hadn’t.

"But that’s not what I was asking, Natalia."

The name again. Every time he said it, something in her recognized it the way a key recognizes a lock.

"You take Velkaris and fly when you are upset. And you were upset enough that Velkaris took you on a trip for the entire night. What happened?"

Serena blinked. Then blinked again.

This was new.

Usually the dragon king surfaced like a whale breaching, a flash of ancient presence behind Dexmon’s eyes, a sentence or two, sometimes a kiss pressed to her forehead with the tenderness of someone visiting a grave, and then gone. Quick. Ceremonial. She was usually too possessed by the moment to do anything but stand there and feel the enormity of it.

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