The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 616

Chapter 616: If She Could Have Felt Him

The memory shifted into a cobblestone square, framed by stone buildings draped in Viremont banners.

Hundreds of people. Packed shoulder to shoulder, filling every available inch of space between the buildings, pressed against walls and balanced on ledges and craned forward with the specific, awful attention of a crowd that had assembled to watch suffering and had convinced itself the watching was mandatory.

A wooden post stood in the center of the square.

"By order of King Viremont, the slave known as Silverveil is hereby sentenced to forty lashes for her crime."

Fin’s blood went cold.

He moved before he thought. His body launched toward the post, toward her, every instinct overriding the fact that he was a ghost in a memory that had already happened. His hands reached for the ropes at her wrists and passed through them like water through a sieve.

He couldn’t touch her. He couldn’t untie her. He couldn’t do a goddamn thing.

"Let every collar in this square remember what freedom costs. You run, you will be caught. There is no mercy."

Her wrists were bound to the post. Her shirt had been torn down the back, exposing a spine he could count every vertebra of, every rib, every bone that should have been hidden beneath muscle and wasn’t because the muscle had been eaten by months of starvation.

A man stood behind her with a whip.

The man was calm. The calm was professional. The calm of a man who had done this enough times that the doing had become procedural, a task on a schedule, a box to tick between lunch and the evening shift.

"STOP." He roared it into the square. Full volume. The command of a king whose voice had ended battles and frozen soldiers mid-stride. "STOP. Look at me. LOOK AT ME, you fucking coward."

The man with the whip didn’t flinch. Didn’t pause. Didn’t hear. The sound of Fin’s voice hit the memory like a fist hitting fog, absorbed, dispersed, gone.

He screamed it again anyway.

CRACK.

The sound split the square. Leather on skin. The whip connected with her back and her body jerked against the post with a violence that snapped her head forward. A cry tore from her throat, high and thin, bitten off at the end because she was trying to hold it, trying to swallow it, trying to deny the man behind her the satisfaction of the full sound.

Fin’s hands shook.

He stepped between her and the whip. Planted himself directly in the path, feet spread, shoulders squared, the stance of a man whose body knew how to be a wall even when the wall was made of smoke.

The second lash passed through his chest and hit her anyway.

CRACK. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

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