The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate-Chapter 173: Fifty-Foot Freefall & Fucked-Up Fae Navigation
Fin felt it on his arm, along with her pain. It was so bad, a raw, ragged sound escaped his throat and he was sweating bullets.
Elias stared at him. "You look like you’re giving birth."
Fin bared his teeth. "It’s her. I feel it through the matebond."
"Do you want me to time the contractions, or..."
Fin’s glare could have set the bedpost on fire.
✦✦✦
Serena saw Dexmon’s cuffs glow white, then red, then split apart and hit the stone floor in molten pieces.
Dexmon dropped from the chains, landing in a crouch, his wounds knitting shut in real time as the pink Fae magic raced into his bloodstream and closed everything it touched. He didn’t need to pause to process it.
Dual blades formed in his hands, conjured from the fire and ice still coursing through him, one burning gold and the other frosted white.
The Dark Fae turned.
It didn’t get a second word out. Dexmon buried both blades into its chest in a single motion, crossed at the sternum, and ripped them outward.
The creature split apart with a wet, percussive crack, black smoke pouring from the wound instead of blood. Its layered voice shrieked once, a sound that existed in frequencies Serena felt in her jaw, and then it collapsed.
Dexmon stepped over the corpse the way most people step over a puddle and didn’t look back.
Serena watched from both places at once, her body trembling on the floor of Fin’s room, her vision locked to him as he tore through the corridors of the fortress. She somehow knew which way he needed to go, but she had no way to tell him.
He made a wrong turn. Left instead of right, heading straight for a corridor that looped back into the holding cells.
Of course. Of course he went left. The man could navigate a battlefield blindfolded but give him a hallway and he was a disaster.
"NO!" she screamed, and her voice tore across both realities at once.
Dexmon skidded to a halt. Then switched directions, which took him down an entirely new path, but still better than the one he was on.
He heard Velkaris roar from the other side of the fortress wall, and made the most Dexmon decision in the history of Dexmon decisions. He hit the balcony at a dead sprint and jumped, launching himself over the railing with the confidence of a man who had never been told no. Which tracked.
A fall that would kill anything that wasn’t caught. No plan. No parachute. Just audacity and an understanding that Velkaris would figure it out.
Velkaris dove. Wings folded, neck extended, a gold streak against the sky that intercepted Dexmon’s fall the way a parent catches a toddler who has hurled itself off furniture. With exasperation and accuracy born of repetition.
Dexmon hit his back hard and grabbed hold, and Velkaris banked upward with a roar that shook the walls of the fortress below them.
Loosely translated from dragon, meant: We are going to discuss this later.
Dexmon grinned into the wind. "Love you too, buddy."
Serena shoved pink magic into Velkaris again, everything she had left, and another portal cracked open ahead of him. He bolted through it, and the fortress disappeared behind them like a door slamming shut.
Next to her in Fin’s quarters, she heard Onyx do a tiny roar.
His body vibrated with the effort like a kitten who had been told he was a lion and believed it with his entire being.
He knew Dexmon was on the other side of the portal and was trying to tell Serena.
Relief hit so hard her ribs ached from it, like her chest had been clenched for hours and finally, violently, let go.
She opened her eyes to look at him.
His eyes glowed bright gold, the exact shade her magic manifests.
He looked at Serena with the unmistakable expression of a creature who had done something important and wanted credit for it.
Her body was still split between two realities, and her first priority was praising the baby dragon. "Good job, Onyx."
He puffed up like he’d been knighted.
"Serena..." Fin kissed her forehead, her temple, her cheek, her jaw, her eyelid. He was mapping her face like he’d forgotten the geography and needed to relearn it in thirty seconds.
Serena wanted to explain everything. What came out instead was the footnotes.
"Dark Fae magic."
"Tell me what you need."
She needed the universe to stop selecting her personally for every catastrophic event in the continent of Skardos.
Before she could respond, dark Fae magic slammed into her through the thread, a counterstrike that hit like a fist made of black glass. Pain lanced through her and him in tandem.
Fin groaned collapsing on her, all two hundred and ten pounds of concentrated Alpha.
From behind him, Elias and Aeron exchanged a glance, both making the internal note to avoid matebonds and child birth with their Alpha for the rest of their natural lives.
Fin’s vision blurred. He made it approximately six inches off her before gravity, pain, and the matebond collectively said no. He went back down. Controlled descent. Sort of.
On his second attempt to get off of her, just as he pushed himself up to lean against the wall, it happened again.
Dark magic flooded her chest, and Serena screamed, high-pitched. Her spine locked, and her Hidden Flame mark flared crystalline hot, pulsing like a second heartbeat, each pulse brighter and more agonizing than the last.
Air. She needed air. Her lungs fought her for it.
"Stop! Please stop!" The words came from her even though she hadn’t meant to beg or say anything. "Make it stop."
But it wouldn’t stop.
Her body was a battlefield, and she was losing every front.
In the capital of Orosia, a Commander drew the short straw. He was going to have to be the one to explain to the High Emperor how one chained alpha, without a wolf, dismantled their entire security operation in under four minutes.
