The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 667

Chapter 667: Since The Day I Saw Her

Lucian found him on the east terrace. Alone. Which was becoming a pattern that worried him more than the dark veins.

Tristan was leaning against the stone balustrade, staring at nothing, the wind pulling at his shirt. He looked thinner. Harder in the wrong places. The fated tie to Vesper was eating him from the inside out, and the man standing on that terrace was a stripped-down version of the one Lucian had grown up beside. Same frame. Same jaw. Less life behind the eyes.

Silence wasn’t protecting anyone anymore. It was just a coffin Lucian had been building around himself, and he was running out of air.

"I need to tell you something." He kept his voice steady, which cost him more than Tristan would ever know. "And you’re going to hate me for it."

Tristan turned his head. "That’s a hell of an opener."

"It’s a hell of a thing."

Tristan searched his face. Whatever he found there made the half-smile die on arrival.

Silence. The wind filled it. Lucian’s hands were shaking at his sides and he locked them into fists because if Tristan saw the tremor, he’d know this was worse than bad. He’d know this was the kind of confession that splits a friendship into the version that existed before it and the wreckage that comes after.

"It’s about River," Tristan said after a moment.

"Yes," Lucian replied.

Tristan shook his head.

"I don’t understand it," he said, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. "How I love someone this deeply, and the tie isn’t blessed by fate. How the Goddess paired me with a woman poisoning me."

Lucian listened. Tristan was standing in front of him being honest, being open, being the man he’d always been, and Lucian was about to repay that openness with the worst sentence he’d ever constructed.

"Fated or not, it is powerful," he said. "It is the most real love I have seen. You know it. She knows it. Father knows it. The rest of us saw it every damn day since you were ten years old."

Tristan exhaled and it shuddered out of him, the kind of breath that a body releases when it’s been holding itself rigid for hours.

"You’re my brother and oldest friend," Lucian continued. "And you know I would do anything for you, right?" 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

"Yes. And I’d do the same for you," Tristan replied, voice cracking.

The sentence landed like a hand on a bruise because Tristan meant it. Meant it completely, without reservation, without conditions, the way Tristan meant everything, because Tristan didn’t know how to love at half-volume and never had. And Lucian was three sentences away from teaching him why he should have.

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