The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 672

Chapter 672: A Queen Has Entered The Game

Power had been chasing Serena Frostborne her entire life. She had never once turned around and chased it back. Today, she stopped running, sat down in its chair, and dared it to do something about it.

The throne had held Finnick Shadowclaw for years. Before that, it had held his father. Before that, a line of Alpha Kings whose combined reign had produced the most powerful wolf kingdom on the continent.

Serena Frostborne sat in it.

She looked wrong and she knew it. The throne was too wide. The armrests were too far apart. Her boots barely cleared the front edge of the seat, and the iron back rose behind her head like a wall that had opinions about her height and was sharing them through proportion.

She sat in it anyway.

Chin up. Spine straight. Hands on the armrests with the deliberate, measured placement of a woman who understood that the first three seconds of sitting in a throne determined whether the room saw a ruler or a guest, and guests got asked to leave.

The throne room was full. Wolves. Elders. Council members. Military officers whose rank was displayed on their armor and whose skepticism was displayed on their faces. Petitioners lined the center aisle, waiting for an audience with an Alpha who was unconscious in a bed three floors up, and the woman sitting in his chair was an outsider.

Shadowclaw’s Beta, Griffin, stood to her right. The Gamma, Knox, to her left. Both of them positioned with the specific spacing that said this person has our support in the body language of military men, and the positioning was doing work that words would have undermined.

She did not seek out power. She had never craved it. She knew what that looked like because she had watched it up close in kingdoms that ran on it, in courts where the wanting was a disease that ate people from the ambition outward. That had never been her. Power found her the way storms found open ground: uninvited, unavoidable, and carrying consequences regardless of her feelings about the weather.

This was one of those times. And she was going to do her damndest to play the role.

The first elder stood before she finished settling.

"The Alpha’s throne is reserved for the Alpha or the crowned Luna of Shadowclaw. You are neither. With respect, Princess Drakenfell, this seat requires a coronation that has yet to occur," Elder Voss stated, his voice cutting across the throne room.

Serena looked at him. Her green eyes were steady. Red-rimmed from crying she had done two hours ago and composed in a way that the crying would never have suggested. The composure was expensive and she was paying for it in real time and the invoice was going directly to the place behind her sternum where she stored things she couldn’t afford to feel.

"I hear you, Elder Voss. And I understand the concern." Her voice was calm. Measured. Carrying zero defensiveness and zero apology, because defensiveness was weakness and apology was permission to push harder and she was offering neither. "The Alpha is not available. The Beta and Gamma have authorized my presence in this capacity. When the Alpha returns, he will make whatever adjustments he sees fit."

Whatever adjustments he sees fit was doing the heavy lifting of a sentence that could have been he might throw me out the second his eyes open and was choosing to frame it as administrative procedure rather than personal catastrophe.

The after the session was diplomatic for shut the hell up and sit down. Elder Voss recognized the dialect. He sat.

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