The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 456

Chapter 456: The Cake Had A Cherry. Bellatrix Placed It.

Gavriel blinked a few times. Something was clearly wrong with the Beta Luna of Drakenfell, and he was seriously considering mindlinking Alaric. Unfortunately, his attention kept getting hijacked by the thing she had just said.

Shifting.

Serena was shifting. The ancestors said she would need to on her own. He wanted to be there for her. Supporting her from a safe distance where two Alphas didn’t try to kill him. But instead he had been in a coma.

Gavriel turned abruptly. He didn’t know when his legs decided that he was going to the training field. But they had, and his brain arrived at that conclusion a second later.

"You probably don’t want to watch," Elara added quickly. "Trust me. It takes forever. Tiberon has to command it. It hurts Dexmon and Finnick both so badly it breaks them out of their own shifts. Every time. One of them is bleeding through their nose, sometimes both. The pain transmits through their matebonds and—"

Her eyes went wide.

He looked at her.

"What?" he sighed.

"Nothing to worry about," she replied after a moment.

She looked up at the sky. At the gods. At whoever was running this goddamn circus from above.

This was in their hands now.

Elara had done everything a Beta Luna and a best friend could do.

She was not going to be the one to break it to Gavriel. Absolutely the fuck not.

But maybe she should give Serena a heads up. After training. Yes, that was the plan.

If it didn’t blow up on the training field, which there was a good chance it might, then she would give Serena a pep talk and break the news.

Serena was a compulsive truth-teller, which was the natural enemy of intelligence in sticky situations such as Exhibit A.

So Elara would make her promise, on their friendship, on the Moon Goddess, on Onyx’s goddamn tuxedo, that she would not tattletale on herself.

The promise would be broken without question. But it would hold for twelve hours.

Probably.

✦✦✦

DRAKENFELL — JUVENILE DRAGON TRAINING YARD

Nobody said a goddamn word.

Bellatrix Drakenfell walked onto the dragon training field at her usual time, in her usual stride, with her usual expression of a woman whose presence was a gift the field had done nothing to earn, and the field received her the way the field had learned to receive her: in silence, with compliance, and with the specific posture of military personnel who had been outmaneuvered enough times to recognize the futility of resistance.

Onyx saw her from across the formation line and broke ranks.

The handlers did not react. The handlers had stopped reacting three days ago.

Nobody needed to spin that story. The story spun itself the way a wheel spins when you push it. One push. Momentum did the rest.

Really, she should have started fainting years ago.

The eight-step plan was in full force.

Mural? Check.

Orphanage? Funded.

Social Calendar? Loaded with joint engagements and a wedding in the works.

She was winning. The divorce papers were still on Tiberon’s desk, but the desk was losing ground to the mural and the orphanage and the fainting and the chest pains and the wedding she was about to plan, and the ground that the desk was losing was the ground that Bellatrix was gaining, and the gaining was her oxygen.

Onyx chirped, pulling her from the mental inventory.

He was looking to the left. His gold eyes had locked onto something across the field, and his body had shifted on her hip, angling toward whatever had caught his attention with the focused curiosity of a creature who wanted to investigate.

People were moving. Heading toward the main training arena. Draken Forces personnel, off-duty handlers, two guards who were definitely supposed to be somewhere else.

They were walking with the specific pace of people heading toward a spectacle, the pace that existed between casual and urgent and communicated ’Something interesting is happening.’

Onyx looked at Bellatrix. His gold eyes were wide, requesting.