The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 627

Chapter 627: Of Course Tristan Set Shit Ablaze

At seven, Tristan gave her a wooden practice sword and declared he was going to train her.

Tristan’s training method consisted of swinging at her and expecting her to figure out the rest. This approach had the pedagogical rigor of throwing a child into a lake and calling it swimming lessons.

The cycle repeated four times before Lucian stepped in, because someone had to, and Tristan’s teaching method was just cheerful encouragement from a safe distance.

"Your grip is wrong." He crouched beside her and repositioned her hands on the wooden hilt. "Here. Three fingers around the base. Thumb on top. Your other hand guides beneath the pommel."

"Like this?"

"Closer. Rotate your wrist. Now your elbow stays tucked. If your elbow flares, your swing follows your shoulder instead of your core and you will hit nothing except the ground, which you have already demonstrated."

"I hit Tristan once."

"You hit Tristan’s sword once. Tristan held it in front of you on purpose so you would feel accomplished. I watched him do it."

River looked at Tristan, who was across the yard pretending he hadn’t heard that. She looked back at Lucian.

"Show me how to hit something he does not hold in front of me on purpose."

Lucian’s gold eyes warmed, brief and completely involuntary. River had a talent for making that happen.

"Swing at my hand. Full speed. My hand will move. Try to follow it."

"What if I hit your hand?"

"Then I will learn to move faster."

They trained for an hour. River hit his hand twice. Lucian moved faster both times after.

Tristan watched from across the yard with a sour expression on his face. He had been supplanted by Lucian, who was producing results with a patience Tristan found both admirable and personally offensive.

✦✦✦

The realization hit Fin the way realizations always hit him, quietly, completely, without the dramatic fanfare that Tristan would have given it.

Fin was watching Tristan at eleven, standing in the courtyard with both hands extended, green magic erupting from his palms in chaotic bursts that scorched a practice target and missed the wall behind it by inches.

Tristan was grinning. Green sparks cascaded from his fingers. A training dummy caught fire.

Beside Lucian, River looked down at her own hands.

She turned them over and examined the palms, then the backs. Lucian had just done something remarkable and she was checking her own hands for evidence that the remarkable might live in her too. The quiet disappointment on her face said it didn’t.

"It hasn’t come for me either." Lucian sat beside her on the bench. His voice was matter-of-fact, carrying zero pity and zero false comfort, because both of those things were insults he would never deliver to a girl who was smart enough to see through them. "Tristan’s manifested early. Most Fae develop at thirteen or fourteen. There is nothing wrong with being on schedule."

"What if mine never comes?"

"Then we will have something in common."

She looked at him. The pink in her eyes caught the afternoon light. The trust on her face was complete. She had decided that Lucian told the truth, and the decision had been made permanently, the way children make decisions when they’ve found someone worth believing.

"Yours will come, Lucian."

"Maybe."

"The priestess said so."

"The priestess said many things. Some of them will be right and some of them will be prophecy, and the difference between those two categories is less clear than adults pretend."

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