The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate

CRACK.

A portal RIPPED open in the chamber, loudly, violently. It was made of pink and defied the laws of portals and physics. It shredded the air apart with a roar of water and pressure that blasted across the chamber, the edges ragged and unstable, the magical equivalent of a door being kicked off its hinges by a woman who didn’t have the strength to turn the handle.

The cuffs were still vibrating and not working.

Serena came through the pink portal like she’d been launched from a cannon. The same lake under the library that usually lit gold and healed her when she touched it didn’t have time to either. Her body skidded across the surface in a blur of limbs and blood, the momentum carrying her straight to the stone ground where she didn’t stop, tumbling end over end, rolling across gravel and rock.

Water was gushing out of the portal she made at the same time. The pressure causing it to shoot across the chamber and hit the wall on the other side.

A gold coin was clutched in a white-knuckled grip that looked like rigor mortis in a living hand. Her fingers were locked around it so tightly the tendons in her wrist stood out like cables, as if her body had decided that releasing the token required death and had committed to the position.

She was coughing full-body convulsions that ripped through her chest and sprayed red across the stone. She gasped between each cough, choking on air she’d been denied, her chest heaving, her skin tinted blue, her lips trembling from cold and suffocation.

"Serena!" Fin was sprinting towards her at Alpha speed.

He dove. Full extension, hands outstretched, every inch of his reach committed to closing the gap between them.

Everything was happening so fast no one saw what was coming through the water still shooting across the chamber.

Fin’s fingertips grazed her arm.

SCHLICK.

She was yanked backward into the stream of water so violently her body left a red streak on the floor, and his hands closed on empty air where she’d been a half second ago.

A tentacle, thick and black and covered in spikes that glistened with dark magic, was still coiled around her ankle.

It extended through the open portal, connected to something on the other side, something that was pulling, dragging her backwards across the lake towards the churning water with the patient, inevitable force of a predator that had already decided this meal was leaving over its dead body.

She went under the water in the underground lake. It lit gold. But she was already on the other side being pulled back through before it could heal her.

"SERENA!" Gavriel rasped.

"SERENA!" Finnick screamed at the same time.

The two voices collided in the chamber, one raw and ruined from a punctured lung, the other cracked open with the pure, unfiltered terror of an Alpha whose mate was being dragged into a portal on the other side of the underground chamber.

Gavriel tried to move. His body lurched forward, every wound tearing open simultaneously, his legs buckling on the first step.

Alaric and Hyran caught him before he hit the ground, one on each side, hauling him upright with the grim efficiency of two men who had been holding this particular wolf together for the last twenty minutes and were getting very goddamn tired of him trying to undo their work.

The sound Finnick Shadowclaw made cracked the chamber ceiling. It was a roar that came from somewhere deeper than his chest, deeper than his wolf, from the place where Alpha instinct lived in its most primal and most terrifying form: the place that said MY MATE and meant it the way gravity means DOWN. The sound split stone. Dust rained from the ceiling. Every person in the chamber felt it in their teeth.

Finnick didn’t hesitate and launched himself across the chamber with the speed of an Alpha who had been waiting for this moment for hours.

Right before he got to the lake, a green bridge fabricated into existence. Fin was so used to this shit by now he didn’t question it.

Behind him and Gavriel, the mages’ jaws dropped in unison.

Tiberon was already moving behind Fin, sprinting across the green bridge without a second thought.

The King of Drakenfell moved at Alpha speed towards that portal with a ferocity that had nothing to do with protocol and everything to do with the three things that were fact. First, she was the Draken Prime and it was his sworn duty to keep her safe. Second, she was the woman his son loved, the woman who had made Dexmon laugh. And third, the thing he would never admit out loud, Tiberon had been pretending was a strategic asset when she had actually become the daughter he never had.

He also knew, with the cold certainty of a father who understood his son better than his son understood himself, that if anything happened to Serena after Tiberon ordered Dexmon to go to the infirmary, Dexmon Drakenfell would never recover.

He was already never going to hear the end of that decision. But if she died down here, in this chamber, on the rune SHE had carved to protect everyone else, while Dex was upstairs because Tiberon had commanded it, the King of Drakenfell would carry that weight for the rest of his life, and his son would carry the grief, and neither of them would ever put it down.

Fin dove straight into the portal with zero hesitation, without a plan, without a backward glance, because Finnick Shadowclaw had already lost one mate and the universe was out of its goddamn mind if it thought he was going to stand in a library and watch it happen twice.

Tiberon dove through the portal after him, disappearing into the churning water with the controlled efficiency of a king who had followed men into worse than this and always brought them back.

Both Alphas pushed past the pressure of water coming from it like it was nothing.

The portal’s edges flickered, destabilized, the ragged opening shrinking inward, the magic sustaining it guttering like a candle in a storm.

Whoever had cast it, Serena’s last reserves, the cuff’s emergency protocol, whatever desperate combination of magic had torn reality open long enough to deliver her to the rune, was failing.