The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 612

Chapter 612: The Weight Of Two Lockets

A shape burst from a side corridor.

Garrett Darkhowler.

Young. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. Built like a man already but wearing the face of a boy who was processing too many things at the speed of war. He was carrying a sword that was too big for his frame and running at a speed that said training had already made him dangerous even if experience hadn’t finished the job.

Elara was behind him. Smaller. Thirteen maybe. Moving with the coordinated precision of a girl who had been trained alongside Serena since childhood and whose training was currently the only thing standing between her body and the panic trying to override it.

Garrett hit the tunnel entrance. The gold barrier Seraphine had placed was still holding, hardened amber blocking the corridor.

"Serena!"

He hit it with his shoulder. It cracked. He hit it again. It shattered.

Serena was on the other side. Curled against the tunnel wall, knees to her chest, face buried in her arms, shoulders shaking with sobs so violent they were silent. The crying had exceeded sound. The crying had gone to a place where noise was insufficient and the body just convulsed.

The locket was in her hand. Clutched in fingers so small the chain wrapped twice around her fist. She had gotten it somehow. Before the gold barrier threw her into the tunnel, before the entrance sealed, she had gotten her mother’s locket, and she was holding it against her chest the way her mother had taught her to.

When you are scared, hold yours, and know that wherever I am, I am holding mine and thinking of you.

Fin’s chest cracked.

The crystalline floor was littered with debris, shattered ice, fragments of architecture, the accumulated wreckage of a kingdom in the process of dying.

Something flashed gold on the ground that didn’t belong. His legs moved on their own.

A white gold chain and the pendant. The matching locket. Seraphine’s half.

His hand reached for it.

His fingers closed around it.

Solid. Warm. Real in his grip in a way that nothing else in this memory was real. His hand didn’t pass through. The chain settled against his palm with weight, actual weight, the specific gravity of gold that had been worn against a woman’s chest for years and still carried her warmth.

Fin stared at it.

He reached into his jacket with his other hand. The ruined locket was there. Blackened. Warped. The remains of Serena’s half, pulled from Guinevere’s fire, carried in his pocket since that night because discarding it would have meant agreeing with the destruction and he refused.

Two lockets. One whole. One destroyed. Two halves of a set that had been designed to exist in pairs.

He closed his fist around Seraphine’s locket and put it in the pocket beside the other one. The weight of them together was almost nothing. The weight of what they meant was the heaviest thing he’d ever carried.

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