The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 668

Chapter 668: Yesterday, I Still Had You

"Tristan, your neck is—"

"I don’t give a fuck about my neck."

"I KNOW you don’t. That’s the problem." Lucian’s voice cracked in half. The controlled register he had held the entire conversation was finally hitting the load limit, and the load was the image of his brother’s neck slowly turning black, and the image was too heavy for the voice carrying it, and the voice gave.

"You don’t give a fuck about anything anymore," he continued. "That’s what the dark magic does. It takes the man who cared about everything and convinces him nothing matters. You used to care about your neck. You used to care about your health. You used to care about what River saw when she looked at you. When did you stop? Can you even remember?"

"You are trying to take her from me." Tristan’s irises flooded black.

Lucian saw it happen. Watched the green get swallowed by the black the way daylight gets swallowed by an eclipse.

"Take her from you? TAKE her?" His voice buckled. "I have spent every day since your wedding making sure she STAYED with you. I held YOUR wife’s grief in my chest through the matebond and never said a word. I watched her love you and I was GLAD, Tristan. I was glad because she was happy and you were happy and the two people I love most in this world were building something beautiful and I would have watched from the outside forever if it meant you got to keep it."

"You were glad." Flat. Testing the words. "My brother was in love with my wife and he was GLAD I had her. BULLSHIT."

Lucian studied his friend with concern. "This isn’t you, Tristan."

"This isn’t me? THIS ISN’T ME?" Tristan’s voice went raw. "My best friend just told me he’s been in love with my wife since before I met her. What version of me is supposed to be standing here right now, Lucian? What face am I supposed to be making? TELL me. Because I don’t have a protocol for this. I don’t have a contingency plan for my BROTHER stabbing me in the chest on a Tuesday evening."

"Look at me, Tristan. LOOK at me. One month ago, could you have screamed at me like that? One month ago the man who told me I’d always have a home, would THAT man be standing here with black veins in his neck calling his brother a liar?"

Tristan flinched. A full-body flinch, the kind that comes when a wound you’ve been ignoring gets hit directly.

"The dark magic is changing you. Every week there’s less of you and more of it, and you’re so busy trying to fix everything that you haven’t noticed you’re disappearing. I’m watching my brother die in slow motion and he won’t even look down at his own goddamn neck."

"Stop calling me your brother." Tristan’s voice was quiet. Wrecked. "You don’t get to use that word right now."

The words Lucian didn’t lie hung between them like a headstone for something that used to be alive.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify