The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 600

Chapter 600: Natalia Needs A Fucking Drink

"Natalia."

Two voices. At the same time. In stereo.

Serena’s palms were still on the stone when hands closed around her arms and lifted. She was vertical before her brain caught up, and the body holding her upright was Fin’s, his chest against her back, his arms locked under hers, and the wrongness of it hit her so hard she almost choked.

He told her to get out.

He told her to get the fuck out. Hours ago. In that office. With that voice. And now he was here, holding her up, saying a name that didn’t belong to this lifetime in a tone that didn’t belong to this man.

She pulled free.

"Don’t." It came out ragged. Wrecked. She twisted out of his grip and stumbled back, putting distance between them because if he touched her again she was going to cry, and she could not cry, she had been crying for hours on a dragon and her body had nothing left and if she started again in front of him, on this field, in front of Alaric and Elara and fourteen dragons and whatever ancient dead kings were currently borrowing her mates like library books, she would not stop.

"I can’t do this right now," she managed.

She looked back at them.

They were standing side by side. Dexmon and Finnick. Both with golden eyes. The same gold. Ancient, luminous, wrong gold that had no business being in either of their faces, and they were looking at her with identical expressions of confused concern, like two puppets being operated by the same hand, and the hand was worried about her and the puppets didn’t understand why she was backing away.

They looked like best friends. They looked like they’d been having a lovely chat about her and had arrived at some kind of consensus about her wellbeing and were now baffled that she wasn’t cooperating with the plan.

Serena needed a fucking drink.

She turned toward the portal, took two steps, and the ground betrayed her again. Her legs folded like someone had cut the strings and the field rushed up to meet her face.

Elara caught her. One arm hooked around Serena’s waist, stopping her momentum an inch before she ate dirt.

"Shit," she hissed, already ducking under Serena’s arm and hauling it across her shoulders.

Serena’s ribs ignited. The position pulled at every wound Viremont had reopened and every muscle Velkaris’s fire had burned through, and the pain was so immediate and so complete that her vision whited out for a full second.

A noise escaped her throat that she killed immediately. She dealt with it.

Because being carried was not an option. Being carried meant being helpless and being helpless meant being a girl on cobblestones with a flayed back and she was not that girl anymore. She locked her jaw, put one foot in front of the other, and let Elara take enough weight to keep her vertical.

Behind her, both golden-eyed mates lurched forward in unison three times in under ten seconds. Serena was unaware of this. But Velkaris watched and found it entertaining.

They walked through the portal together.

Alaric’s eyes moved from Charlie to Serena. Back to Charlie. Back to Serena. The calculation was visible, a healer triaging if the underground lake was the right call here.

"No brainer," Serena snapped. "I’m tazing my insides every time I make a portal so someone else will need to open one to the lake."

The tone came out with more bite than she intended. Somewhere between exhausted and venomous, the vocal equivalent of a woman who had been crying for hours, rescued a dying man, been possessed, healed, dropped, caught, and called by a dead woman’s name twice, and was officially crabby.

Elara burst out laughing. The kind that escaped before she could catch it, loud and startled, her hand flying to her mouth a full second too late.

Alaric blinked. Then blinked again. His face did the thing faces do when the brain behind them is processing something it wasn’t built to receive, a brief, visible buffering, like a man who had been handed a document in a language he didn’t speak and was too proud to admit it.

Behind them, both Dexmon and Fin tilted their heads. At the same time. At the same angle. Two possessed Alphas with matching golden eyes performing the same gesture of ancient, synchronized confusion, like a pair of owls that had just watched a mouse do something unexpected.

Then the Dragon King raised one hand and a portal ripped open three feet to his left.

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