The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate-Chapter 156: Mommy, Look!

All of Fin’s instincts said no and to turn around. Xeon was clawing at the walls of his mind, furious, and Fin couldn’t blame him.

The underground chamber materialized around him. The others were there. Gav stood facing the portal arms crossed, clearly waiting for Serena. His usual humor was gone. Hyran stood perfectly still with the expression of a man knowing exactly what was about to happen.

Fin turned immediately, seeing her on the other side of the portal. But blood was coming from her nose. Not gold, red. She hunched, clutching her ribs.

"SERENA."

He moved at Alpha speed to go back to her. Alpha speed is very impressive right up until the moment you use it to run face-first into nothing. The portal snapped closed before he could get to her.

"FUCK."

He punched the ground so hard his knuckles bled.

✦✦✦

Serena touched under her nose, felt blood, and fell to her knees. The portal snapped shut so quickly she didn’t realize it happened until after.

"Don’t panic," she said to herself aloud. "I just need to recharge."

Don’t panic is what she would usually tell Elara right before they both would absolutely panic.

She wiped the blood from her nose with the back of her hand and forced herself to assess. Open clearing. Tall grass. No cover. If anyone was watching, she was a target sitting in the center of a bullseye.

She climbed a tree to the top, to get a view.

Serena: Aurelia, if you can hear me, I want it on record that I climbed this tree with grace and athleticism and did not almost fall twice.

No response.

On one side she saw the ocean and islands, which confirmed she was in the southern part of the continent. In the opposite direction, she saw a fortress.

Even if she wanted to go back to Drakenfell, she couldn’t. She needed to recharge. She came to Orosia on a mission and that was to get everyone returned home safe. Dexmon and Tiberon were out there and every second wasted was a second they didn’t have.

She sighed knowing full well, she would get a stern talking to about this if she survived. But she’d already crossed the line where "going back" stopped being a direction and became a memory.

What was her plan? Go in there and ask for a portal to the capital? Why would they help her? They probably wanted to kill her.

Walking into a foreign court and asking for a favor was the diplomatic equivalent of sticking your hand in a wolf’s mouth and hoping it found you charming.

Still, something told her to try. ’Something’ as in, she had no other options and stubbornness was free.

She climbed down the tree and pulled the top half of training suit on, over her sports bra. It was hot and uncomfortable.

Then she broke out into a sprint. To her relief, she was able to go at Alpha speed. At least one thing still worked. She’d take it. Beggars. Choosers. Enemy continent.

She kept running, until she came upon the outskirts of the fortress. It was breathtaking, white marble and someone had spent a tremendous amount of money making sure no one would ever call this a "fortress" to their face.

As soon as she started seeing Fae out and about, her stomach dropped. The stereotype that Fae were ’impossibly beautiful’ was one she always thought an exaggeration. She’d met non-Orosian Fae before and hadn’t noticed. The Fae she saw earlier in Valenthor mostly wore helmets and a few looked disturbing. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

But here, all of them were beautiful. To quote Gavriel, it was disgusting. Every face was symmetrical to the point of discomfort. It was like an entire civilization had been designed by someone who’d never met an ugly person and was morally opposed to the concept.

She saw Fae men practicing sparring with blades that curved like crescent moons. Pretty swords for pretty people.

Women wore two-piece gowns, showing their midsections freely. Laughing. Dressed like they had never once worried about being cold, judged, or attacked. It was, frankly, aspirational.

She saw Fae children playing. Children played the same everywhere. Chasing each other, screaming, ignoring all sense of personal space. Apparently, that was universal across species and continents.

Serena swallowed, trying to reconcile with the fact she’d lumped everyone on this continent into the same category when that was clearly not the case. Though, in her defense, the last hundred or so Orosian Fae she’d met had tried to kill her. But just because some wielded dark magic, didn’t mean the entire continent did.

She turned her attention back to the Fae below, and felt something else, something she hadn’t expected. It was almost as if their energy was flowing towards her, or she could feel them, different than the way she would sense Aeron or Hyran’s energy.

Mage energy was static, a presence she could detect the way you detect heat from a fire.

This was not that. This energy was moving, reaching, threading towards her as if it had a will of its own, and the closer she focused on it, the more she realized it was proactively refilling her.

Filling like water in a container. She hadn’t fully understood how empty she was until it began pouring in.

She could sense them in a deeper manner than she had ever sensed anyone who wasn’t tied to her through the matebond.

She looked down and saw she was glowing pink. She felt her crown vibrate into existence on her head again. She looked back up and saw a few more people frozen, watching her. They stared. Serena stared back.

A little girl spotted her and tugged at her mother’s skirt.

"Mommy, look! The pink lady from the story. Did she lose her dress in the woods?" The collective breath of the crowd held until the child added, "She looks much more tired than the drawings. And she has a smudge on her nose."

Serena swallowed, nodding to the onlookers as she made her way down the street. She had absolutely no plan, but her instincts told her to be direct with this fortress.

Give trust to get it. And sneaking into a palace was not the way she wanted to start. If Hyran were here, he’d have told her that walking into a Fae palace uninvited was the diplomatic equivalent of lighting yourself on fire.

People continued to freeze, moving out of the way for her. Almost like they couldn’t believe she was real.

Then, one knelt. To her horror, more followed.

"Oh, please, you don’t have to—" she started to say in High Orosian. "That’s not...you don’t need to bow to me."

There was no use. Most lowered to one knee, some were full-on bowing, noses on the ground.

She picked up her pace, debating if she should just run at Alpha speed or if that would scare them.

After about a minute, she decided it was worth the risk. She was attracting entirely too much attention, and wasn’t trying to start a rebellion or take over.

She sprinted at Alpha speed towards the palace.