The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate

They crossed the bridge in a blur.

Fin’s boots hit the rocky shore and he was already dropping, already lowering, already moving with the frantic economy of a man operating on terror and training in equal measure.

He placed her flat on the volcanic stone, hands trembling as he positioned them over her sternum. His fingers interlocked, arms locked straight, shoulders stacked directly above his wrists the way every warrior was taught in field medic drills that nobody ever wanted to use.

Her skin was too pale. Her lashes were wet and her chest was still.

"She’s breathing, right?" Gavriel rasped from behind him, and the crack in his voice answered the question before Fin did.

"She’s not," Fin said, and the words came out broken, fractured down the middle, held together by nothing except the fact that his hands were already moving.

He started compressions. Sharp. Powerful. Rhythmic. His palms were driving down in steady, controlled pumps meant to force her heart to remember what it was supposed to be doing, meant to bully her lungs into accepting air they’d forgotten how to process.

Each push sent a shudder through him that had nothing to do with the cold.

"Come on, baby..."

Another push. Another.

Gavriel watched the man he’d been resenting pour everything he had into the chest of the woman they both loved, and the resentment died so quietly he didn’t notice it leave.

Fin’s compressions were perfect. His face was not. Tears were running down his jaw and landing on her chest between pumps and he wasn’t wiping them because wiping them would mean releasing the rhythm and the rhythm was the only thing standing between her and a word he would not say, would not think, would not allow to exist in any language in any world while his hands were still moving.

"You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to fucking do this, Serena."

Another push.

Gavriel dropped beside him. His hand found hers and held it the way a man holds a rope over a cliff, with everything he had and the understanding that letting go was the same as falling. Green light was leaking from his hands without his permission, flowing into her skin, finding her ribs, wrapping around her lungs like hands trying to physically open them from the inside.

"Come on, Frostborne."

His magic had decided that if her body wouldn’t breathe on its own, it would breathe for her, and the magic didn’t care that Gavriel was crying or that his chest wound was bleeding through the wraps or that the man beside him was slamming her heart back to life with the controlled violence of a lover who refused to grieve.

Serena jolted.

Her body seized, spine arching off the stone, and she coughed with a violence that sounded like her chest was trying to turn itself inside out.

Water spilled from her mouth, dark and mixed with a trace of red from her throat, splattering across the volcanic rock. She turned her head, gagging as more came up, her entire body shaking with the convulsive force of lungs expelling a lake they’d been drowning in.

Fin’s hands shot to her back, steadying her, holding her through each spasm the way you hold a person whose body is fighting its way back to life and doesn’t care how ugly the process looks.

Her next cough broke. Her chest hitched. She inhaled, wet and rough and insufficient and absolutely, undeniably alive. The sound of that inhale hit Gavriel harder than the tentacle that had put a hole in his chest.

Gavriel’s hand found hers again. The jolt of electricity from skin contact barely registered for Serena, who was still coughing up blood.

But for Fin, who was holding her, the echo of the spark registered louder than anything. He could feel it in his own fingers.

He stiffened, glancing down where Gavriel had made contact.

Every Alpha instinct in his body flared at another male touching his mate when she was vulnerable, injured, barely conscious. The territorial impulse was a chemical thing, primal, the kind of response that lived below decision-making and operated on voltage instead of logic.

He didn’t act on it.

He clenched his jaw, locked his shoulders, and let it happen, because Gavriel Sterling was making Serena’s breathing steadier, and Finnick Shadowclaw was many things but he would swallow every territorial instinct he owned before he took that away from her.

The green that had been quietly going into her body surged even brighter, as if it were holding up a sign that said ’This Magic Belongs to The Gamma Named Gavriel.’

It poured through his palm and into her body like a current finding ground, washing through her in a wave of emerald light that spread from the point of contact outward across her skin, sinking beneath the surface, reaching for damage his eyes couldn’t see but his Fae senses could map in excruciating detail.

Gavriel wasn’t fully in control. His magic was operating on instinct, responding to Serena the way a reflex responds to a hammer on a knee, automatic and absolute. But he was aware. His eyes were locked entirely on her, jaw clenched so tight the muscle jumped, breaths ragged through teeth still tinted red from the blood in his lungs. He knew what he was doing. He just couldn’t explain how.

The magic pulsed through her in steady waves, each one deeper than the last, reaching for things inside her that were broken and burned and depleted, coaxing her reserves back from the cliff’s edge they’d been dangling over since the cave.

This time, Tiberon and Fin both went still.

Because the green magic pouring into Serena was coming from a source that had nothing to do with the Draken Prime and everything to do with a Gamma who had graduated at the top of his class with zero magical ability and was now running a full Fae healing channel like he’d been doing it his whole life.