The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate

"She’s my ex."

Garrett gave a dark, uncharacteristic laugh. The kind that sounded like it had been sitting in storage, collecting dust and resentment. "The most stressful four months of my life. And I escaped Frostborne."

Agnes’s head snapped up. Serena’s did too. Their jaws dropped at the exact same time, in the exact same way, a synchronized reaction so identical it was physically uncomfortable for both of them.

Serena ignored it. Because she would never be friends with Agnes Viremont-Darkhowler. Ever. Even if she defended her once. Even if she called her a friend in a hallway. That woman calling her "friend" was a glitch in the matrix.

"Why would you ever date her?" Agnes asked, blunt as a brick. "She’s a bitch."

Garrett gave her a flat look.

Agnes was not deterred. "I have a fated matebond. What’s her excuse?"

"Fin’s endorsement of his cousin."

Relief hit Serena like a wall and she hated how immense it was. But damn, thank the gods, the woman who called her a cock socket wasn’t sleeping with Fin. A cousin.

Agnes had settled into an armchair like she was nesting, tea-stained dress and all, with no indication she would give Serena and Garrett a minute alone. And Serena didn’t have it in her to pretend any of this was normal. The hallway, the word "friend," the identical jaw-drop she was still refusing to acknowledge.

"You’ll have to excuse me, Gare. I just remembered I need to take care of something."

The lie was what it was. But Garrett, being Garrett, gave her the grace of not calling it out.

She left the room, turned left instead of right, and took a different path back to avoid seeing Fin or anyone else.

The corridors were empty. The torches were low. And the silence gave her thoughts room to expand.

Before meeting Fin’s cousin, she’d been thinking about Dexmon. She’d come back from Drakenfell upset because she’d never seen him like that. She just wanted to take care of him. Be in the same room and not have it be about politics or war or who she belonged to. But that thought had been buried under the last two hours, and now all she felt was tired.

She was turning the final corner, thinking she was in the clear to reach Fin’s quarters and be alone, when she nearly walked straight into Aeron.

"There you are. Maelor is here and..." He stopped mid-sentence. "You have been crying."

"No. I’m alright, thank you, Aeron."

"No, you’re not." He said it the way Alaric would have. Factual. Not unkind, but not interested in the performance. "Hyran is here as well."

✦✦✦

"Where are the scrolls?"

"With Gavriel. Who is guarding them with his life."

Serena raised an eyebrow.

"I mean that literally," Hyran added. "He’s taking himself entirely too seriously."

Aeron looked like he wanted to ask a follow-up question and decided against it.

"Okay, so how do I research the scrolls if I don’t even have a name or any context outside of the fact that they are Fae?"

"That sounds like a you problem," Hyran answered flatly. "I think your touch will activate them, my prediction."

Hyran Thornfell: mentor, genius, and the least helpful, helpful person Serena had ever met.

Maelor, who had been ignoring the entire conversation, turned to Serena.

"Summon your Fae magic."

He clasped his hands behind his back and waited. He said it the way a conductor says "begin," with the full expectation that the orchestra would perform.

Serena held out her hand. The orchestra did not perform.

She tried again. Gold flickered at her fingertips, familiar and warm, but the pink was absent.

Nothing.

Her Fae magic had ghosted her.

"I can’t find it."

Maelor’s expression cycled through three stages of impatience in under two seconds. The first was disbelief. The second was professional offense. The third was the look of a virtuoso watching someone hold a violin backwards.

"You can’t find it," he repeated.

"It was there before. It’s not responding."

Maelor closed his eyes, and drew a breath through his nose.

"Emotions are not the only way to summon Fae magic," he said, like it was obvious. "An object in motion tends to stay in motion. When Fae magic is conjured, generating more becomes easier. Momentum builds on itself."

He began pacing, hands still clasped, chin lifted, every gesture calibrated for maximum dramatic effect.

"But when it stalls completely," he continued, voice rising, "restarting it is brutal. The resistance is enormous. Like pushing a boulder uphill from a dead stop."

He turned sharply.

"Normally, an adult Fae’s magic automatically regulates a child Fae’s until the child is old enough to maintain and generate on their own. You are a very late bloomer."

Serena didn’t argue, there was no point.

He stopped pacing, almost like he was annoyed an applause hadn’t followed his statement.

"I will give you a push to get started. After that, you maintain it. Do not let it stall again or we repeat this conversation, and I do not enjoy repeating myself."

He raised his hand. Pink light flared from his palm, warm and unfamiliar, and something inside Serena’s chest ignited in response. The sensation was startling, like a second heartbeat she’d forgotten she had.

Pink magic flooded her hands.

"Good," Maelor said. "Now fabricate something."

Serena focused. The pink didn’t want to be shaped so much as guided, like trying to pour water into a mold while the water had opinions about the mold.

A sword materialized in her right hand. Translucent at the edges, solid at the core.

She blinked at it, then fabricated another. Then an arrow. Then a full quiver.

Each one came faster than the last. Maelor was right. Momentum built on itself. But the magic felt unnatural, like writing with her non-dominant hand. Functional, but without the instinct her gold carried.

Hyran noticed. His eyes tracked the speed of her fabrication, the slight delay between intention and execution, and he said nothing.

Aeron, on the other hand, leaned forward in his chair, eyes bright with genuine fascination.

"The dual-signature fabrication is remarkable. The structural integrity holds despite the unfamiliarity." He narrated her progress like he was documenting a rare species. "She’s compensating with discipline what she lacks in instinct."

"Of course she is," Maelor clipped, as though Aeron had pointed out that fire was hot. "She trained under Hyran Thornfell. Discipline is the only thing that man teaches besides sarcasm and disappointment."

Hyran didn’t look up. "I’m right here, Maelor."

"I’m aware."

Serena fabricated a full set of pink arrows, rapid-fire, each one materializing and dropping into a neat line on the table. When she pushed further, trying to match the speed of her gold fabrication, her insides caught fire.

The burn started at her solar plexus and radiated outward like a crack spreading through ice. She hunched forward, and her nose started bleeding. Red. Not gold.

She dropped to her knees.

None of the three men in the room reacted with alarm.

Hyran looked up from his notes unimpressed.

"What," he said, in the tone of a man watching a routine unfold. "You usually pass out at this point. I’m surprised you’re still conscious."

Serena shot him a glare through the blood running over her upper lip.

"Don’t give me that look," he said evenly. "This is actually an improvement. Last time you collapsed after overpowering yourself, you were out for days."

Aeron passed her a cloth. She pressed it to her nose and stayed on her knees, breathing through the burning, waiting for it to pass.

Maelor watched with clinical detachment.

"Momentum stalled," he observed. "She pushed past her threshold and the magic recoiled. Predictable. Unpleasant. Not dangerous at this level."

He crouched in front of her, mismatched eyes level with hers.

"That," he said, pointing at her nose, "is your body telling you where the ceiling is. Every time you push against it, it moves. The nosebleed stops when you’re strong enough that the expenditure no longer exceeds your capacity." He straightened, adjusting his robes with a flourish. "It is, in essence, growing pains. Dramatic, messy, and temporary. Much like adolescence."

He paused, then added, to no one in particular: "I was extraordinary at adolescence, for the record."

Hyran and Aeron exchanged a look.

Then the burning changed.

The heat in her chest deepened, shifted, turned into something that had nothing to do with overexertion.

The temperature in the room plummeted in a tight radius around her, so sudden and so localized that frost crystallized on the stone beneath her knees. The windows cracked, three clean fractures spidering across the glass in unison.

Gold magic flared across her skin without permission, wrapping her in a pulse of light that sealed around her like armor.

On her forearm, her Hidden Flame mark burned white-hot.

Then the whispers started.

They slithered through the cold air, layered and ancient, voices that curled around her skull without malice. They weren’t trying to hurt her. They were trying to tell her something.

"He is a traitor."

Serena forgot how to breathe for a second. "Do you hear that?"

Hyran’s focus sharpened. "Hear what?"

Aeron shook his head once, already scanning the room.

"Enough." Maelor’s voice cut through the air like a blade. He spoke three words in a language Serena didn’t know, and the whispers dissolved like smoke in a wind that wasn’t there. Color had drained from his face, though his posture betrayed nothing. "Go again. Fabricate an arrow and stop summoning your gold."

Serena looked down. Golden light still coated her hands, her arms, her chest on its own.

She looked at Hyran.

He held her stare. Then he turned to Aeron, voice measured.

"The containment wards on this corridor. The resonance buffers on the lower wing. The suppression lattice in the foundation. All intact?"

"Yes," Aeron said flatly. "I set them myself."

Maelor tilted his head, mismatched eyes sliding between them with unhurried patience. "Perhaps they need to be audited by a mage other than yourself, Aeron."

"Audited. By whom?"

Maelor smiled. "I’d be happy to volunteer."

"I’m sure you would, Maelor." Aeron narrowed his eyes. "Your hands are full already with Drakenfell’s, are they not?"