The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate-Chapter 121: Oh Fuck, It’s Behind Her

Gavriel Sterling couldn’t sleep, and he blamed the cheese.

Not that he’d eaten cheese. But something had to be responsible for the fact that he’d been staring at the canopy above his bed for the better part of two hours, wide awake, mind running laps like a wolf with nowhere to hunt.

If it wasn’t cheese, it was probably the universe being personally vindictive towards him. Which tracked.

He’d tried everything. Counting sheep. Counting kills. Counting the number of women in the Western territories who would weep if they knew he was alone in bed right now. That last one had almost worked, but then he’d lost count somewhere around forty and had to start over, and by then the moment was ruined.

So he did what any reasonable person would do at an unreasonable hour.

He went for a walk.

The halls of the palace were quiet this time of night. Torches burned low in their sconces, and the stone corridors stretched out in every direction like the spine of something ancient and sleeping. Gav moved through them with the loose, rolling gait of someone who was either very comfortable or very dangerous. Both, in his case.

He was rounding the corner near the east gallery when the painting moved. The massive oil portrait of some long-dead Drakenfell ancestor swung outward on silent hinges, revealing the passage behind it, and a figure slipped through.

Gav pressed himself against the wall on instinct, melting into shadow.

Serena.

She was wearing a cloak thrown over a silk chemise that barely reached her thighs. The cloak was too big. The boots were unlaced. The chemise was silk and doing absolutely nothing to convince anyone she’d planned this outing.

Gav tilted his head.

She looked, objectively, cute. Like a very small, very determined ghost who’d gotten lost on the way to haunt someone. But the look on her face killed whatever joke was forming in his throat. And there it was. Right on schedule. His chest did that thing it did around her.

That quiet, inconvenient tightening that he’d gotten very good at ignoring and very bad at stopping.

Her jaw was set. Her eyes were too bright, glassy in the low torchlight, and her hands were shaking at her sides. This wasn’t a midnight stroll. She was running from something, or towards something, and she didn’t want company for either.

Which, naturally, meant Gav was going to follow her.

He kept his distance. Twenty feet. Thirty. Enough to stay out of her scent range if the air cooperated. She moved fast for someone so small, her boots barely making a sound on the stone, and she didn’t look back once.

She stopped at the library doors.

They were locked. Massive iron-banded oak, sealed for the night, and Serena stood in front of them for exactly one second before a key materialized in her hand. Just appeared. One moment her fingers were empty and the next they were wrapped around a skeleton key that was made of gold magic.

Gav stared.

Right. Fabrication. He kept forgetting she could do that. It was deeply unfair and also deeply attractive, and he filed that thought away for a time when it wouldn’t be creepy.

The lock turned. The doors opened. Serena slipped inside and pulled them shut behind her.

Gav waited three breaths, then followed.

The library at night was a different animal than the library by day. During the day, it was impressive. Vaulted ceilings, stained glass, more books than any single person could read in ten lifetimes. At night, it was a cathedral of shadow. The stained glass was black. The shelves rose like walls of a labyrinth, and the only light came from the reading lamps that never fully extinguished, burning low and amber at intervals along the aisles.

Serena walked past the main collection, past the historical archives, past the genealogy section, and headed straight for the restricted section.

Gav’s brows rose.

Serena fabricated another key. This one was longer than the first, more intricate, and the lock resisted for a few seconds before it gave.

The gate swung open and she stepped through.

Gav stared at the gate as it began to swing shut.

He looked at the lock. Looked at the gate. Looked at the narrowing gap as it swung closed.

He lunged.

His shoulder caught the edge of the gate a second before it sealed, and he squeezed through the gap with the kind of gracelessness that he would deny under oath.

He pressed himself against the nearest shelf and held his breath, listening. Serena’s footsteps were already deeper in the stacks. She hadn’t heard him. Good.

The restricted section was darker than the rest of the library. The lamps here burned lower.

He followed at a distance, slipping between shelves, keeping her in sight. She moved like she was running out of time. She read faster than most wolves could track, and she wasn’t slowing down.

Whatever she was looking for, it was urgent enough to drag her out of bed into the restricted section of a library in her underwear. That was a level of determination that deserved respect.

He was about to step out and announce himself, maybe open with something charming and only mildly terrifying, when he saw it.

A shimmer.

Not light, exactly. More like heat. The kind of distortion that rose off sun-scorched stone in summer, except there was no heat source. It was next to her. Like the outline of a figure rendered in warped air.

Gav went very still.

Serena stopped reading, body tensing. She turned to face the shimmer.

"What do you want?" she said. Her voice was low and tight.

The shimmer didn’t move. Or maybe it did. Gav couldn’t tell. His eyes were watering from the effort of focusing on something that wasn’t quite there.

He blinked hard. Once. Twice. The shape was still there.

He didn’t hear anything. No voice. No response.

But Serena’s expression shifted, her lips pressing into a thin line, and she turned back to the shelf with a sharp exhale, like whatever it had said had pissed her off.

Gav blinked again.

Gone.

The shimmer was gone. The air where it had been was just air. Normal, boring, non-sentient air.

He stared at the empty space for a long moment. His wolf stirred, hackles rising, but there was nothing to growl at. Nothing to track. Whatever it had been, it had left no scent, no sound, no trace.

What the hell.

He shook his head. Dragged a hand down his face. Looked again. Nothing.

Serena was back to her books, reading at that same blistering speed, pulling texts, scanning, re-shelving. Her hands were steady, but her breathing wasn’t. He could hear it from here.

Gav made his decision. Whatever she was dealing with, she was dealing with it alone, and he wasn’t going to let that continue. He pushed off the shelf and stepped into the aisle.

The shimmer reappeared.

Closer this time. So close that the air around Serena’s shoulders rippled, and Gav saw her spine lock.

One second it was behind her. The next, her book was airborne, some pages breaking loose and scattering on the stone, and Serena let out a high-pitched scream.

The shimmer was gone before the book landed ten feet away from her.

His heart was hammering. His wolf was snarling inside his chest, clawing at something it couldn’t find, and every instinct he had was screaming that whatever he’d just seen was wrong. Fundamentally, deeply wrong.

"Serena?" He stepped out from behind the shelves, hands raised where she could see them.

She screamed again.

She spun towards him, and the look on her face cracked something open in his chest. Her eyes were wide and red-rimmed, tears tracking down her cheeks, and her whole body was trembling.

Not startled-trembling. Terrified-trembling. The kind of shaking that came from somewhere deeper than surprise.

He’d seen Serena face things that would make grown wolves flee. He’d watched her walk into rooms that wanted to destroy her and walk out standing. He’d never, not once, seen her look like this.

Afraid. Truly afraid. And completely alone in it.

"It’s me." He kept his voice low. Steady. The kind of voice you used with cornered animals and people who were one bad second away from breaking apart. "It’s Gav. Just Gav."

For a long, terrible second, she stared at him like she didn’t know who he was.

Then recognition flooded her face, and the tears came faster.

"Gav?" Her voice cracked on his name.

"Yeah." He took a slow step forward. Then another. "Want to tell me why you’re in the restricted section of the library in your nightgown, screaming at empty air?"

She didn’t laugh. Instead, she blinked back tears.

"Before you scream again, I’d like to point out that I’m real, I’m handsome, and I’m not whatever the hell that was."

Serena didn’t laugh. She always found the dry, quiet humor in things. Always. It was the one constant. And right now, looking at him with tears on her cheeks and terror in her eyes, she had nothing.

He closed the distance between them and stopped just short of touching her, because the look on her face said one wrong move would shatter her completely.

"Serena." He said her name softer this time. No joke. No deflection. No mask. Just him and the terrible, useless truth of what he felt, standing in a dark library, watching the woman he loved fall apart. "Talk to me."