The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 602

Chapter 602: The Dead King Is Fucking Pissed

Gavriel laid her down on the infirmary bed with the care of a man placing something fragile on a shelf.

Serena was off it in two seconds.

"I’m soaking wet." She was already standing, water pooling on the stone floor around her boots, the bed linens darkened in a Serena-shaped silhouette. "Oh shoot."

"Serena." Gavriel looked at the bed. Looked at her. Looked at the bed again. "It’s a sheet. It’s a sheet on a mattress. In an infirmary. Where people come to bleed. You think a little lake water is what’s going to ruin the ambiance?"

She didn’t sit back down.

He pinched the bridge of his nose. "You just made me carry you through a portal like a drowned cat and your concern is the thread count. I want you to hear that out loud."

Alaric walked in. His eyes swept Serena head to toe in under a second, the clinical intake of a man whose brain sorted patients by severity the way other people sorted laundry.

"Can you check on Charlie first?" Serena said before he could open his mouth. "Or can we do this in his room? I want to be there when—"

"The Draken Prime comes first, Natalia."

Dexmon’s voice. The dragon king’s tone. Calm. Final. The verbal equivalent of a door being closed and locked from the inside.

Serena turned to look at him. The golden eyes stared back at her with the patient, immovable authority of a man who had given this exact instruction before and had no intention of giving it differently now.

She’d heard it once. On Velkaris’s back, at sunrise, somewhere above the clouds. One time.

But he said it like they’d had this argument a thousand times. Like this was a well-worn groove in a conversation that had been playing on repeat across lifetimes, the part where she tried to put someone else first and he redirected her with the same four words and the same ancient, unblinking certainty that the Draken Prime’s health was not a negotiation.

"I’m fine," she insisted.

The dragon king did not respond. His expression communicated very clearly that he was not fucking around.

Alaric worked in silence while three men watched him.

Two of them weren’t the men they appeared to be. Dexmon and Fin watched with identical golden eyes.

Gavriel stood between them. His eyes were his own. His opinions were his own. And he was keeping every single one of them behind his teeth, but Serena could feel them bleeding through, a low, steady hum of protective fury and worry and something territorial that he was leashing with visible effort.

She could feel all of it. She wished she couldn’t.

Alaric’s hands moved across her ribs, clinical, efficient, his expression giving nothing. Then he stopped.

"Who is the man?"

Serena blinked. Alaric didn’t ask personal questions. Alaric asked medical questions. What hurts, where does it hurt, how long has it hurt, and stop lying about how much it hurts. The backstory of someone was outside his usual diagnostic territory.

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