The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 606

Chapter 606: The Son He Never Met

"It was my decision."

"It was the wrong decision."

"It was the only one I was ever going to make." His hand slid into her hair. The white strands caught on his fingers, tangling, and the sensation of it pulled a sound from his chest that was quiet and wrecked and reverent. "I would choose it again. In every life. In every body. In every version of this conversation you wish to have with me, the answer remains unchanged."

"You are infuriating."

"I have been told. Often. Primarily by you."

A sound left her that she didn’t recognize. Something between a laugh and a sob, wet and ugly and human, a noise that belonged to a woman whose grief and her love for this man occupied the same room and kept crashing into each other.

"Natalia." His hand cupped her jaw. Tilted her face up. Gold eyes met green, and the gold was so bright it turned the shadows on the ceiling into daylight. "Hear me. There was never anything to forgive."

She heard the words land in her own soul like a key turning in a lock she’d been carrying since birth.

"You broke the matebond because I begged you. You saved our child because I begged you. Everything you did in that temple was precisely what I asked of you, and I would ask again, and the only regret I carry across ten thousand years is that I could not remain long enough to watch you do it."

Serena felt the lock open.

She felt something release inside her that she’d been gripping so tightly she’d forgotten she was holding it. The grief didn’t vanish. It shifted. It moved from the place where it had been crushing her into a place where it could breathe, and the breathing was the first full breath that piece of her soul had taken in any lifetime she’d ever lived.

She heard herself whisper the next words with the specific, trembling precision of a woman delivering testimony she’d been rehearsing for millennia.

"We had a son, Ronan."

His jaw trembled. Serena watched it happen on Fin’s face and felt it through the matebond and the combination was devastating because Finnick Shadowclaw’s jaw did the same thing when he was breaking and the sameness was the cruelest confirmation that these were the same souls wearing different suits and the suits changed and the grief never did.

"I know." His voice cracked on the word. "I know we did."

"He bore your likeness." Her hands framed his face, thumbs pressing into his cheekbones, holding him the way you hold something precious that you lost once and found again and refuse to release twice. "Your jaw. Your eyes. Your stubbornness. Every time he set his chin and declared himself well when he was bleeding, I saw you. Every time, Ronan. For the rest of my life, I saw you in his face."

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