The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 610

Chapter 610: What He Saved From The Fire

Her mother met her at the bottom. She crouched, bringing herself to eye level, and reached inside the collar of her dress. She pulled out a locket. White gold. Delicate. Hanging on a chain so fine it looked like it had been spun from light.

She unclasped a second one from around the girl’s neck. Held them side by side.

Matching.

Identical metalwork. Identical chains. Two halves of a set that had been designed to exist in pairs, the kind of jewelry that said we belong to each other and the belonging is permanent.

"Do you remember what I told you about these?"

"That yours has your heartbeat in it and mine has mine and when we are apart we can hold them and hear each other."

"Close enough." Her mother pressed both lockets into Serena’s palms and closed her small fingers around them. "This one is mine. This one is yours. When you are scared, hold yours, and know that wherever I am, I am holding mine and thinking of you."

The girl looked at the lockets in her hands with an expression that Fin recognized because he’d seen it on her face a thousand times in this life. The expression of a woman cataloguing something important into a place where it could never be lost.

"Can I wear both?"

"You wear yours. I wear mine. That is the arrangement."

"What if I lose mine?"

"You will never lose yours. You are your father’s daughter, and your father has never lost anything he intended to keep."

Fin watched the mother fasten the locket around the girl’s neck. Watched the girl touch it once, pressing it against her chest with both hands, holding it against her sternum the way a soldier holds a wound.

He knew that locket.

He had seen it in this life. Guinevere Ashford had ripped it from Serena’s neck and thrown it into a fire, and the fire had consumed the only physical object that connected Serena Frostborne to a mother who was gone. He still had it. What was left of it. The blackened, warped remains that he’d pulled from the ashes and kept because throwing it away felt like participating in the destruction and keeping it felt like holding a promise he didn’t know how to return.

He carried the ruined locket in his jacket. He’d never told her. He’d never told anyone. The keeping was private, a decision made in a room where Guinevere’s cruelty was still warm, and the decision was instinct. You don’t leave a woman’s heart in ashes. You pick it up. Even when it’s broken. Especially when it’s broken.

The memory shifted.

✦✦✦

Night.

He had heard Serena describe it before. Caustic Suppression Miasma. Fatal to wolves and mages. Usually deployed by arrow. She had said it the way a surgeon describes a procedure. Detached. Professional.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify