The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 656

Chapter 656: The Devil’s In The Dungeon

Miles passed. The signal kept building. Grief and resolve and fear layering on top of each other, each one amplifying the others, the emotional equivalent of a woman climbing stairs towards a ledge.

Then the pain hit.

Lucian’s wolf form collapsed.

The shift broke mid-stride, his body transitioning from wolf to man without his permission, without his control, the pain so violent it overrode every biological function including the one that kept him in fur. He tumbled across the forest floor. Roots and rocks and packed earth scraped across skin that had been paws a second ago, and his men scattered in every direction.

He landed on his back.

The canopy above him was green and gold and irrelevant because every nerve in his body was receiving a transmission from the matebond that was beyond anything he had prepared for.

River was screaming.

He couldn’t hear it. She was a hundred miles south. But the matebond carried the scream the way it carried everything: at full fidelity, without filter, the exact frequency of a woman whose soul was being separated from something it had been woven into.

Lucian’s back arched against the forest floor. His hands clawed at dirt and roots. The pain cascading through the matebond was borrowed, echo, secondhand, but the secondhand of a matebond transmission was still enough to make his body convulse because the matebond didn’t transmit at reduced volume. It transmitted everything. Including this.

Her pain.

The matebond was forcing Lucian to experience his mate breaking something that she wasn’t supposed to be breaking. Something with her soul.

His Beta was at his side in a flash, shifted and kneeling.

"What is it, Alpha?"

Lucian couldn’t answer. His jaw was locked. His eyes were wide, dilated, fixed on the canopy, seeing nothing in it and everything inside his own chest.

Through the matebond, River’s scream peaked. Her back arching off a stone slab a hundred miles away.

Then the pain stopped.

The sudden absence was worse than the presence. It went quiet, carrying only the faint, exhausted pulse of a woman who had survived something devastating and had nothing left.

Lucian lay on the forest floor, gasping.

He could still feel her. But the signal had changed.

Lucian pressed his palms flat against the earth and breathed.

"Alpha?" His Beta’s voice was careful. The tone of a man watching his king lie on the ground and wondering whether the lie was voluntary.

"I’m fine."

He was absolutely, comprehensively, catastrophically lying.

"What did you do, River," he breathed.

The words were too quiet for his Beta to hear.

Fin stood above him, looking down at a wolf king on his back in a forest at midday, and the expression on Fin’s face was the expression of a man who understood that the worst part wasn’t the pain.

"She broke her fated tie," he said quietly to no one.

Through the matebond, River’s signal shifted again. She was awake. She was moving. She was... leaving. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

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