Page 125 of The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate
“Lydia.”
“Don’t, Lucas.” Her voice comes out steadily. “I know what you are about to say. I know I am hurt. I know I will not be at full strength. I also know exactly what those creatures look like up close. I know what their leader sounds like. I will not sleep again until I have had the chance to look for her. Lucas, please.”
He studies her.
“Your father trained both of us to fight,” she reminds him softly.
“I remember.”
“Then trust him.”
He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “Alright.”
I step forward before Lucas can turn back to the map. “I’m going, too.”
All eyes move to me.
“Sienna,” he begins, and his voice has dropped to the careful register it takes when he is about to argue with me and already knows he cannot win.
“I know how a Moonvale assault team handles a fortified extraction. I designed the framework half of you in this room have been quoting back at me for the past month. I am not sitting around while one of my best friends goes after her mother.”
His hand lifts toward me, and he runs his thumb along the curse line at my collarbone. “Sienna.”
“Lucas.” I cover his hand with my own. “If you’re thinking I’m going to let you walk into that place without me, stop. It’s not going to happen. We go together.”
There’s a dangerous flicker in his eyes. It’s not anger. It’s hotter and lower than that, and it has nothing to do with this situation and everything to do with how close to each other we are standing.
His thumb moves once more, against the pulse point in my neck this time. “Fine,” he murmurs.
It’s not the word that pierces my chest; it’s the look in his eyes when he says it. Heat. Pride. A fury narrowed to one bright point, waiting to be aimed.
“Then it’s set,” Darius says behind us. “Lucas, you and I run the southern push with my men and yours. The three of you—Lydia, Sienna, Violet—plus a strike unit of ten of our best take the north entry. You find Lillian. You bring her home.”
Lucas’s hand drops from my throat. He does not step back. “We brief at first light.”
The office empties. Darius folds his arm around Violet’s shoulders and walks her to the door. Lydia turns under her own power and disappears down the corridor toward her room, her good hand braced against the wall.
Lucas catches my wrist before I have made it past the desk.
He turns me into him in one slow motion. I let him. His mouth comes down at the side of my throat just above the curse mark. He breathes in once, deeply, and holds it.
“Sienna…”
“I know.”
“If anything happens to you in that place…”
“It won’t.”
He pulls back enough to look at my face.
“You stay close to Lydia. You stay close to Violet. You do not, under any circumstance, engage Zion. You see him, you go the other way. Do you understand me?”
“I understand.”
“Say it.”
“I won’t engage him, Lucas.”
