The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 567

Chapter 567: The Knotty Art Of War

Dexmon’s jaw flexed harder, clocking the dark stain spreading through the thermal weave fabric on her leg, confirming what Gavriel had described.

He reached for the thermal weave at her waist to peel the rest of it off.

Then his hands stopped because his brain caught up to remind him that there was another man sitting six feet away.

He looked at Gavriel.

Gavriel looked at him.

Then Gavriel’s nostrils flared. The flare was small, involuntary, the reflex of a wolf whose body was responding to stimuli while his brain was furiously telling it to shut the fuck up, because this was a live grenade wrapped in a minefield wearing a ’nothing to see here’ hat.

Every instinct in his body was screaming to stay. She was hurt. She was unconscious. She might need him. His magic was still reaching for hers through a matebond Dexmon couldn’t see, his green magic was refilling her reserves.

He wanted to be in this room because she was his mate and she was wounded and the wounded was producing a pull in his chest that was physical and undeniable and had nothing to do with Dexmon and everything to do with the woman on the bed.

But Dexmon didn’t know.

Gavriel left the room without a word.

The door closed behind him with a click that sounded a lot like a man swallowing something that tasted like broken glass and calling it discipline.

He stood in the hallway outside the infirmary private chamber, back against the stone wall, one hand pressed to his freshly wrapped chest, the other hanging at his side, and stared at the ceiling without seeing it.

✦✦✦

While a Master Mage and King of Drakenfell had a whiskey, three other Alphas called it an early night, thoroughly exhausted.

Zero of them could sleep.

The first was next to his mate in an infirmary private chamber. But he couldn’t pull her on top of him to hold her, and he also couldn’t shake the feeling he was missing something.

The second was across the continent in Shadowfell, pissed off, bruised, stabbed to shit, body wrapped like a mummy, and still fucking furious but completely incapable of processing any of it.

The third was in his chambers, giving the ceiling a thousand-yard stare because he had to step away from his mate and it was absolutely killing him to not be there with her.

✦✦✦

OROSIA — THE JADE WAR ROOM

The war room emptied in under four seconds.

Guards, attendants, a scribe mid-sentence, two advisors who had been waiting for an audience since dawn. All of them evacuated with the coordinated urgency of people who had learned, through experience and self-preservation, that when the High Emperor’s magic cracked the floor, the conversation was over and the building was optional.

The Emperor stood in the center of the room, both hands braced against the war table, his fingers buried in the wood hard enough to splinter the grain. Green magic bled from his skin in erratic pulses, scorching the polished jade beneath his boots in hairline fractures that spread outward like veins in a leaf.

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