The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate

The lake won.

Gavriel had eleven seconds of consciousness left. He spent ten of them trying to reach her before tentacles erupted around him.

These were thicker. Armored. Barbed with ridges that cut into his skin on contact. One slammed around his torso, spikes cutting through his flesh, and squeezed hard enough to crack ribs and knock the remaining air from his lungs in a single, devastating compression.

Another wrapped his leg and yanked downward, reversing his momentum in an instant. A third coiled around his throat and tightened with the slow, deliberate pressure of a creature that understood anatomy and was applying force to the exact spot where it would do the most damage.

White spots burst across Gavriel’s vision.

His lungs screamed for air that didn’t exist. His fingers went numb, the cold and the pressure and the lack of oxygen collaborating on a shutdown his body was losing the vote against. The tentacle around his throat pulsed like a vise, each pulse tighter than the last, and the edges of his consciousness began to darken.

He tried to slash. His arm jerked backward as another tentacle clamped around his wrist, pinning the sword at an angle that made it useless. Four limbs restrained. Throat closing. Vision tunneling.

He couldn’t move.

He couldn’t see Serena anymore. The darkness had taken her, and the matebond was delivering her fear and pain in waves that were getting weaker, which was worse than the waves getting stronger, because weaker meant she was fading.

He fought. Thrashed. Strained against the tentacles with every muscle he owned, desperate to break free, desperate to reach her, desperate with the specific desperation of a man who had just mated this woman hours ago and was about to lose her at the bottom of a lake he shouldn’t have let them enter.

Another tentacle shot from the darkness.

This one was different. Thin. Needle-sharp. Moving with the targeted velocity of a weapon, and it punched straight through his chest.

His entire body seized.

Vision exploded white. A wet, choking sound escaped his throat, underwater. It was half blood and half the last air his lungs would ever hold, and the pain was so absolute and so total that it overrode every other sensation including the matebond, including the fear, including the green magic that flickered and died around him like a candle in a hurricane.

The creature dragged him downward. Pressure crushed in from every side. His vision went from white to black to nothing.

Then his bracelet vibrated.

The thin gold band on his wrist, the one that hadn’t worked in the temple, the one he’d stared at while Serena was unconscious and willed to activate and watched sit silent and useless on his arm, woke up. Magic detonated outward from the Aureus Catenes cuff in a pulse that hit his own green magic like a whip, the two frequencies colliding with a force that was violent and absolute and completely uninterested in the tentacles’ opinions on the matter.

The lake vanished.

The tentacles vanished.

The cold, the dark, the pressure, the needle through his chest, all of it disappeared in a single, disorienting instant, replaced by hard stone and dry air and gravity reasserting itself with the cruelty of a force that had been waiting for him.

He hit the stone on his knees.

The rune Serena had carved into the floor beneath the library in Drakenfell. He was kneeling on it, soaking wet, blood spreading beneath him in a puddle that was growing faster than a puddle should grow.

Stone meant air and air meant surface, which meant he was alive, which should have been good news except his hands were empty.

He coughed and blood spattered the stone. His hand flew to the puncture wound in his chest, and the hole was real and open and pouring, and his lungs were filling with fluid that wasn’t air, and his legs were shaking.

"FUCK!" he roared, voice raw, thick, furious, terrified. The roar echoed through the chamber and up the stairs and into the library above, carrying every ounce of rage and fear and helplessness he owned, because Serena was still at the bottom of that lake and he was HERE and his cuff had saved him and HERS HADN’T ACTIVATED YET.

He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see straight. His vision doubled, tripled, went dark at the edges.

Gavriel Sterling came back from Volcano Vacation Island with a hole in his chest, blood in his lungs, and without Serena Frostborne. In that order.

Two sets of boots hit the floor at a dead sprint.

Fin Shadowclaw reached him first, sliding to his knees on the wet stone, hands already on Gavriel’s shoulders, eyes wild with the particular terror of a mate who had been pacing this chamber for hours imagining every possible horror and had just watched the worst one materialize in front of him.

"Gavriel. GAVRIEL. Where is she?! What happened?!"

Gavriel tried to answer. The words formed in his brain, fully constructed, coherent, urgent: she’s at the bottom of a lake, something has her, her cuff hasn’t gone off, GO. Every syllable was ready. His mouth opened and blood came out instead.

He coughed again, chest heaving, hand pressed to the wound that was still pumping between his fingers.

He couldn’t get enough air. Every inhale was a whistling, wet, insufficient thing that didn’t reach his lungs. His body was shutting down with the systematic efficiency of a machine whose operator had been removed, and the only thing keeping him upright was the fury from the woman he loved drowning while he bled on a floor he couldn’t get up from.

"Don’t move!" Tiberon Drakenfell’s voice cut through the chamber with the authority of a king who had been commanding men in crisis for thirty years and had zero tolerance for soldiers who died before he gave them permission.

He was sprinting toward Gavriel, which was a thing Tiberon Drakenfell almost never did, and the fact that he was doing it now communicated more about the severity of the situation than any words could have. "Sterling, STAY STILL!"