The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 626

Chapter 626: Fate Was Sitting On A Rock

The thing about running through a forest with stolen amphibians is that you never expect to find the person who’s going to change your life sitting on a rock at the river’s edge. But life has never cared about expectations, and neither did the girl with white hair and pink eyes.

Fin watched two boys run through the forest. Tristan was carrying frogs. Lucian was keeping pace, watchful, covering the flank of a ten-year-old whose idea of a relaxing afternoon involved stolen amphibians and architectural trespass.

Then Tristan stopped.

Lucian stopped beside him. His eyes found what Tristan’s had found a half-second earlier, because Lucian’s eyes always arrived a half-second after Tristan’s but covered twice the ground.

A girl. Small. Curled on a rock at the river’s edge with her knees pulled to her chest and her face buried in her arms. White hair, matted with dirt, hanging around her like a curtain she’d pulled shut against the world. She was crying. Quiet crying. The kind that children learn when loud crying gets them hit.

Lucian’s playfulness vanished.

The transition was immediate, total, the complete replacement of one operating mode with another. One second he was a boy running through a forest with frogs. The next he was something else, something older and steadier and carrying a watchfulness that a ten-year-old shouldn’t have possessed.

"Why is she crying?" Lucian whispered.

"I have no idea."

They approached slowly. The girl flinched at the sound of boots on wet stone but kept her face buried. She was small. Smaller than either of them. Six years old, maybe. Her dress was torn at the hem, stained with something dark.

Lucian crouched three feet from the rock. "Hey. Are you okay?"

She lifted her head by one inch. Pink eyes, enormous, red-rimmed, wet. They looked at Lucian, then at Tristan, then back at the rock, as if the rock was the only thing in the world she trusted.

She said nothing.

Lucian’s gold eyes moved to her wrist. He saw the crescent marking before Tristan did, because Lucian was always cataloguing details that Tristan’s enthusiasm ran past. The brand. Glowing. Pale and raised. Slave property.

His jaw tightened, and for the first time, Fin saw the man inside the boy. The expression was too old for his face. Quiet. Controlled. Angry in the specific way that people are angry when they recognize injustice before they learn what to call it.

"We will keep your secret," Tristan said. "Nobody will know you are here."

Her pink eyes lifted. Found Tristan’s face. Found whatever she was looking for.

Tristan extended his hand. "Come with me."

She took it.

He had watched River’s face during the ceremony. He had watched the moment Atlas said it is done and the moment the words registered in a girl’s face and the moment the registration produced an expression that Lucian understood. It was a child hearing, for the first time, that they existed in a way that was permanent.

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