The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate

Finnick dropped to his knees beside Gavriel, and his voice broke on the first word.

"We’ll get back to her." His hand gripped Gavriel’s shoulder, the grip carrying everything he couldn’t say and wouldn’t say in a room full of people, the terror and the fury and the guilt from leaving his mate. "We will. But you’re going to live first, because you’re no use to her dead. So you are going to stay down and you are going to let them work."

Gavriel closed his eyes. His jaw locked tight enough to crack teeth. His breath shook, each exhale a tremor that ran from his chest to his fingertips, and the green magic pulsing from his body flickered in time with his heartbeat.

"What day is it?" he gritted out, sweat beading along his hairline as Hyran pushed another wave of gold into his chest.

Hyran didn’t soften the answer. "Same day you left. Afternoon now. How much time passed for you?"

Gavriel’s breath hitched. "At least thirty-six hours. If I had to guess."

The number landed in the chamber like a grenade.

Finnick’s jaw tightened so hard the muscle in his neck jumped visibly. Over a full day. Serena had been inside that temple for over a full day, fighting whatever the hell was in there, alone now, alone because Gavriel’s cuff had yanked him out and hers hadn’t, and thirty-six hours was a long goddamn time to survive on depleted magic and willpower in a place that had already put a hole through Gavriel Sterling’s chest.

Alaric and Hyran finished binding the last wrap. Each hooked an arm under Gavriel and hauled him carefully to his feet, the motion coordinated, practiced, the kind of lift two men perform when they’ve carried enough wounded soldiers to know where the weight needs to go and where the injuries won’t tolerate pressure.

Gavriel’s legs nearly gave out. His knees buckled, his weight shifted, and for a full second, he was held upright by nothing except Alaric’s grip and Hyran’s shoulder and the stubbornness of a man whose body had quit and whose mind had refused the resignation letter.

He forced his legs to lock. Forced his spine straight. Forced himself vertical through an act of will that had nothing to do with physical capability and everything to do with the fact that the woman he loved was at the bottom of a frozen lake and he would stand on shattered legs if that’s what standing required.

"I’m going back," Gavriel said. His voice was firm despite the tremor. Despite the blood still seeping through the wraps. Despite the fact that his lungs were whistling on every inhale and his vision was still doubling at the edges.

Nobody misunderstood him.

He wasn’t saying he was going back to the temple. He wasn’t requesting permission. He wasn’t asking for a plan or a portal or a briefing on what happened while he was gone.

He was saying one thing, and it landed in the chamber with the weight of a war horn sounding across an open field:

I’m staying right here on this rune until she appears on it, and if she doesn’t appear on it, I’m going back in after her, and every person in this room can either help me or get out of my way.

The room braced for Tiberon to shut it down. To pull rank. To deliver the cold, strategic calculus that said a bleeding soldier doesn’t go back into a fight he barely survived, that emotion is not a battle plan, that they needed to regroup and assess and do every rational thing that rational men do when the situation calls for patience.

Tiberon looked at Gavriel. Looked at the wound. Looked at the rune.

"How deep is the lake?" he asked.

Not "no." Not "stand down." Not "we’ll discuss this after you’ve been treated." A tactical question. A logistics question. The question of a man who had already decided they were going back and was now building the operation around the bleeding idiot who’d volunteered to lead it.

"Over one hundred feet," Gavriel answered.

Before Tiberon could ask anything else, every flame mark in the chamber ignited at the same time.

Aeron’s hand flew to his chest. Tiberon’s jaw clenched. Alaric swore under his breath. Hyran’s fingers stalled.

Maelor, who didn’t have one, watched everyone flinch in unison and didn’t ask. He had connected the dots ages ago on it.

Then the cuffs went off.

Not the usual pulse. Not the low, steady vibration that signaled a check-in or a location ping. This was violent, erratic, the kind of vibration that rattled against bone, the cuffs screaming at a frequency that meant one thing and had only ever meant one thing: the wearer was dying or about to.

Every set of eyes locked on the rune.

They waited. Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen. The cuffs kept vibrating. The rune stayed dark.

Finnick’s breathing changed. Tiberon’s hand moved to his sword. Alaric took two steps toward the rune and stopped, because there was nowhere to go and nothing to do and the helplessness of standing in a room full of power while the rune refused to activate was the kind of cruelty that no amount of rank or magic or combat training could fix.

She didn’t appear.

Then white light flared across every cuff simultaneously.

None of them commented. None of them were surprised either. Nothing involving Serena Frostborne was off limits. Why wouldn’t they glow? On brand.

The bracelets pulsed again. Fast. Frantic. The rhythm was too rapid to be a heartbeat, too deliberate to be random, the cadence of an alarm system that had been dormant and was now shrieking, like a tether being violently shaken from the other side of the world by hands that were running out of time to shake it.

They all felt it.

Their hidden flame marks that were searing hot switched to ice. Like she was switching her approach.

But she should be on the rune. The bracelet was going off, that meant she should be appearing next to Gavriel.

Something was very, very wrong.

And then, across the wide stone chamber beneath the library, something happened that none of them saw coming.