The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 605

Chapter 605: Ten Thousand Years Of Missing You

SHADOWCLAW — ALPHA’S PRIVATE CHAMBERS

Serena woke in a bed that should have rejected her.

The sheets smelled like Fin. Pine and iron and the particular warmth that belonged to one man in any kingdom on any continent. The pillow beneath her head had been adjusted, positioned at the angle her neck needed, placed by hands that knew the architecture of her sleep better than she did.

She knew this room the way lungs know oxygen. She had fallen asleep in this room dozens of times, pressed against the chest of a man whose heartbeat was the closest thing to a lullaby she’d ever allowed herself. She had memorized the shadows on the ceiling. She had counted the seconds between his exhales.

She also remembered the last words Finnick Shadowclaw had spoken to her in this castle.

Get the fuck out.

The words lived in her ribs like shrapnel. Still there. Still sharp. Still cutting every time she inhaled too deep.

Arms were around her.

Strong. Steady. Locked beneath her ribcage with zero intention of releasing. The chest against her back rose and fell in a rhythm she could have identified blindfolded, the heartbeat she had mapped so thoroughly she could pick it from a thousand others.

But the hold was wrong.

Fin held her possessively. Protectively. With the coiled intensity of an Alpha whose grip was a perimeter, his body a wall between her and everything else. His arms around her always carried tension, the tension of a man whose love came with teeth and whose teeth were always bared at the world on her behalf.

This hold had none of that.

These arms were wrapped around her with the careful, desperate tenderness of hands that had been waiting ten thousand years and were terrified she would dissolve if they held too tight. The pressure was achingly gentle. The breathing behind her was controlled, measured, the rhythm of a man savoring every inhale because each one carried her scent and each one was borrowed time and he goddamn well knew it.

Her chest tightened.

She was aware. Fully, brutally aware. She could feel her own body, her own lungs, her own heartbeat hammering against the inside of her sternum. She could feel every thread of the sheets against her skin and every degree of heat radiating from the body behind her.

But she was a passenger.

Her limbs moved without her permission. Her head lifted from the pillow with a slowness that belonged to another woman, another lifetime, and her eyes blinked once, twice, three times, adjusting to the low light of the Alpha’s chambers.

She turned in his arms.

Who is Ronan?

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