The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 556

Chapter 556: A Flame Without An Ending

"BRACE!" Tiberon roared.

CRASH.

The boat slammed into the crater wall with an impact that rattled every bone in Gavriel’s body twice. The sound of a magic boat hitting a cliff at full speed is exactly as unpleasant as it sounds and twice as bad when you’re inside it.

Serena’s engineering was genius. Serena’s passengers were suffering. The two were not mutually exclusive and never had been.

They shot upward along the rock face, the bubble grinding against volcanic stone, sparks of gold trailing beneath them as the rope hauled the vessel higher and higher.

The ascent looked beautiful from the outside. From the inside it felt like being shaken inside a jar by a very angry child who had opinions about physics.

Fin braced his legs wide, Serena locked against his chest, his body absorbing every jolt so hers didn’t have to. His arm hadn’t loosened since she collapsed. His arm was never going to loosen again, as far as his wolf was concerned, and he was in full agreement that the concept of ’putting her down’ had been permanently removed from his vocabulary.

The rope carried them higher. Five hundred feet of vertical ascent compressed into seconds, the golden line reeling them upward until the boat crested the lip of a cave mouth carved into the crater wall and lurched to a grinding halt on solid rock.

Fin stepped out first, boots hitting stone, Serena cradled against him, her face pressed into the crook of his neck. Her breathing was shallow but present, each exhale a warm ghost against his skin that confirmed she was alive.

Gavriel followed, half-stumbling, his hand pressed against the wraps on his chest that had graduated from barely functional to decorative somewhere during the ascent. His legs were assholes for holding, because they’d been threatening to quit for the last hour and had apparently decided that spite was a valid fuel source.

Tiberon exited last.

For one heartbeat, one fraction of a second he would never admit to and no one would ever witness, the King of Drakenfell glanced back at the golden boat resting on the cave’s ledge. At the dome, still shimmering. At the rope, still glowing.

A grin crossed his face. Small. Private. Gone before it fully formed.

"Clever girl," he muttered.

The highest compliment Tiberon Drakenfell had given anyone in a decade.

The moment evaporated. His expression reset to iron. The bow snapped back into firing position, and Tiberon turned to face the lake below, scanning the dark water and the fractured ice with the cold sweep of a commander who had never once assumed a retreat meant the fight was over.

A vampire broke the surface.

Its claws found the volcanic rock and it began to climb, fingers punching into stone with a strength that shouldn’t have belonged to something that looked like a cadaver, ascending toward the cave mouth with the single-minded hunger of a predator that had locked its target and abandoned every instinct except the one that said UP.

Tiberon nocked another arrow

Fired.

Ash.

He stood at the mouth of a cave on a volcano island, firing a bow at dark-magic vampires five hundred feet below like he did this every day like it was no big deal.

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