The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate

Chapter 303: I Sent For Mates And Got You

"Serena, please don’t." His voice was rough, strained, the words of a man who was watching the woman he loved bleed herself to heal him and hated every second of it.

The skin sizzled on contact just as Dex’s did, the wounds sealing in real time. His breathing became less ragged.

She didn’t stop, moving her hand to his dislocated shoulder. She wasn’t sure if her blood could even help that, but she squeezed more of it onto him without flinching.

His expression was tense watching her, but the relief that he felt was something that even he couldn’t hide with Alpha composure.

Fin pushed himself upright, two massive bruises already replacing the puncture wounds, color returning to his face with a speed that made Alaric’s left eyebrow climb toward his hairline. His hand found the flask in his coat. One long swig. So much for a quiet night.

Serena was turning towards Gav, brows knit.

"Don’t even think about it," Gav said flatly. "I didn’t get one."

It was true. He was the only one the creature had never pierced. Every spike, every barbed tentacle, every corrupted blade that thing had driven through flesh had found Dex, Fin, or her. He had been in that water just as long. Dove twice. Carried bodies to the surface on empty lungs.

The lake had every opportunity to open him up the way it opened them, and it chose otherwise. Luck like that didn’t feel like a gift. It felt like an oversight, and Gavriel Sterling was acutely aware that he’d built his entire rescue on borrowed time the creature forgot to collect.

Serena hadn’t even looked at her own injuries. She hadn’t unzipped her own suit, hadn’t asked for treatment, hadn’t so much as acknowledged the three wounds in her back that were still seeping through Gav’s bandages. Too focused on everyone else to think of herself. As always. As every single time.

Fin reached for her, intending to pull her into him, but she flinched the instant his hand brushed her side. Her training suit was damp. Soaked. And when Fin lifted his hand, it came away drenched in red. Not gold.

His eyes went dark. He said her name, sharp, urgent, but the sound was already distant, muffled, falling away from her.

Because to her, there were two rooms.

The High Emperor, entering the cavern they had just escaped, his rage so vast it shook the stone beneath his feet. Serena’s heart lurched violently. He felt her watching. His head snapped towards his own reflection, and his eyes glowed with murderous satisfaction.

Her eyes squeezed shut. She dragged in a breath that barely made it into her lungs. Then she fell on all fours. She coughed, blood splattering the floor under her.

"Baby, fuck." Fin was next to her in a heartbeat.

A bolt of agony tore through her skull so sharply that Fin winced, hand shooting to his temple.

Alaric spoke, ordering something, calling her name, but his voice was fading, distant, coming through water. Serena blinked against the black spots eating at her vision. She didn’t notice Fin pulling at the zipper of her suit. She didn’t hear Alaric barking at his assistants.

Another flash struck. The High Emperor again, moving through swirling smoke, traveling with impossible speed, his aura coiled around something she couldn’t see.

Serena: Aurelia, can you see this too?

Aurelia: Yes. I do not understand what it is.

Serena: Am I losing my mind?

Aurelia: No. He has his claws in us, and I do not yet know how to free us. But I am going to find out, and when I do, I am going to bite him.

The room tilted. Her pulse thundered. The vision clawed deeper.

And Serena realized she wasn’t just seeing the Emperor. He was seeing her.

Through her eyes, he could see the recovery room, the fireplaces, the Drakenfell crest on the wall. He could see Fin beside her, Maelor against the far wall, Alaric frozen mid-assessment. He was cataloguing every detail of the room where she stood, and the smile on his face said he intended to remember it.

"Hello, Serena."

Her entire body locked. His voice sounded as though he stood beside her, whispering against her skin.

"Are you in pain?" Alaric’s voice cut through the haze. Serena didn’t register the question.

"I asked if it hurts to breathe," he repeated, firmer.

"No. I’m all right, thank you, Alaric," she answered calmly. Too calmly. Her voice didn’t match the panic roaring through her bones.

And then it hit Fin.

A vision slammed into his mind through the matebond, violent, intrusive. The exact one tearing through Serena. The High Emperor traveling through smoke, stepping out of it as though it were a doorway. Fin saw him standing inches away. The Emperor lifted a hand and waved. Mocking. Deliberate.

Fin’s eyes went gold.

Xeon: KILL HIM.

Fin: He’s a vision. I can’t.

Xeon: FIND HIM. THEN KILL HIM.

Fin: I will.

Across the room, Gav’s hand flew to his forehead and he hunched over. No one had noticed.

He could see the recovery chamber, firelight, Alaric’s back. But the lake was there too, superimposed over the room like a second image laid on glass. The Emperor stood at the water’s edge, dark magic coiling around his boots.

He looked around the room, and began walking like he owned the place, hands clasped behind his back. Steps measured. Passing through the healers without disturbing them, passing through furniture without touching it, a ghost touring a house he planned to burn.

He stopped at Dex’s bed, looking down.

"That looks painful," he commented. His hand moved to touch Dex’s head.

"Get your fucking hands off of him," Gavriel growled, pushing himself to stand fully, ignoring his head that felt like it was going to explode.

Every eye in the recovery room turned towards him.

He stood, fists clenched, nose now bleeding, glaring at the empty space above Dex’s bed. Talking to no one. Threatening no one. The healers exchanged glances. Alaric’s hand paused mid-treatment.

The Emperor’s gaze locked onto Gav.

"I sent for the mates and got you." His eyes narrowed. "What are you?"

He walked to the fireplace. Picked up the iron poker. To the room, the poker lifted off its hook by itself and hung in the air. A healer screamed. Alaric shoved an assistant behind him.

The Emperor turned it over in his hand, the firelight catching the iron tip, and looked at Gav.

"We’ve done this before, you and I." He tilted the poker. "You remember."

"Last time, you barely saw me." The Emperor rested the poker on his shoulder, casual, conversational. "Now you can. I haven’t decided if that makes this more fun or less."

Fin was off the bed. Swaying. Gold-eyed. Blood running from the stitches he’d just torn open.

"Put it down," Fin said, and his voice belonged to something older than him.

The emperor ignored him. He lunged, and drove the poker downward towards Dex without changing expression. The way a man pushes a pin into a map.

Four hands caught it. Fin from the left, Gav from the right. The iron stopped two inches above Dex’s chest, held by a wolf king and a Gamma, both of them white-knuckled, both of them trembling, the Emperor’s force pressing down against their combined grip.

"Two of you," the Emperor observed. "To stop one hand. And I’m not even here."

He pressed harder. The poker inched down. One inch from Dex’s chest. Fin’s arms were shaking. Gav’s boots were sliding on the stone floor.

"Let go," Gav gritted, arms shaking.

"You first," the Emperor said.

Then Fin roared. Not a word. Not a command. A sound from a place deeper than language, and the poker shattered in their hands. Iron fragments scattered across the bed.

The Emperor’s connection severed.

The room was one room again. Silent. The poker was in pieces. Fin and Gav were standing over Dex’s bed, breathing hard, bleeding, holding broken iron.

Every healer in the room was pressed against the far wall.

Gav glanced at Fin. "That is new."

Fin blinked, equally as surprised.

Maelor crossed the room in three strides to Serena, who was still on all fours. He knelt next to her. His hands came up, emerald light already gathering between his palms, and he pressed them to both sides of her head.

His nosebleed worsened on contact, a fresh line of red tracking down his upper lip.

"This will hurt," he said, meeting her green eyes with his mismatched ones. "And then it will stop."

"It’s okay, Maelor," she said softly.

The emerald light flared. The cloak fell over her mind like a curtain of iron, severing the vision mid-frame, cutting the tether’s signal with a brutality that made Serena’s back arch.

Her eyes rolled. Her body went limp as she collapsed on the floor.

The room went silent.

Maelor held his hands in place for three more seconds, the emerald light burning steady until he was certain the cloak had set. Then he pulled back and swayed on his feet. Gav caught his arm before he went sideways.

"She’ll be unconscious for several hours," Maelor said, his voice thin and hollowed out. "The cloak is holding. When she wakes, he will still be able to feel her emotions through the tether, but he will be unable to see through her eyes again until the cloak degrades. I will need to do it again."

"How long before it degrades?" Fin’s voice was quiet. The wrong kind of quiet.

Maelor looked at him with mismatched eyes that held zero comfort. "Seven days. If she stays calm. Less if she doesn’t."

Fin looked at Serena. Unconscious, bandaged, blood still on her lips, wounds still bleeding through her suit because she’d healed everyone in the room before herself.

He looked at Maelor.

"Then we make sure she stays calm."

Maelor’s expression suggested he found that statement optimistic at best.