Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint-Chapter 72

Angel’s POV

I nodded, promising not to do anything rash or stupid, even though my heart was already racing at everything.

I was genuinely scared now.

Terrell sat on the edge of the bed. Then he looked at me and patted the space beside him. "Come sit with me."

I went and sat down, looking at his profile while I waited.

"You’re probably wondering," he began slowly, like he was picking his way across unstable ground, "why you’ve been here alone. Why the Alpha hasn’t come to speak with you. Why no one has said anything to you about what happens next."

I said nothing. I just watched him struggle with whatever was locked behind his teeth, and I nodded once.

He exhaled. "It’s because the Alpha isn’t truly the Alpha."

I stared at him.

"What?"

"The man who came to take you from Hawkins Castle," he said carefully. "The man who rode with you, the one everyone called Alpha..."

"He wasn’t?" I heard my own voice from somewhere slightly outside myself. "He was pretending? All of that - the authority, the way everyone deferred to him, the way he..." I stopped. Shook my head. "He was just filling in?"

Terrell nodded. "He was filling in for the true Alpha. Yes."

I turned that over. And over. Trying to find the angle at which it made sense.

"So the scarred man," I said slowly. "The one I stabbed because I believed he was the monster who murdered my family... the one I was supposed to be married to..." My voice cracked on the word. "He wasn’t even the real Alpha."

"No."

A heavy panic had begun to move through me. The kind that doesn’t announce itself loudly - it just quietly dismantles everything you thought was solid ground beneath your feet, until you look down and find you’ve been standing on nothing at all.

I pressed my hands together in my lap. Breathed in through my nose.

"If he isn’t the Alpha, then who is?"

Silence.

"Who is the Alpha, Uriel?" My voice came out very quiet. "Who is the man that destroyed my life? Who is the monster that killed my sister, her baby, my parents... everyone I..."

I couldn’t finish the sentence.

Terrell didn’t answer with words.

He looked down at his own chest. And slowly, deliberately, he touched the crest sewn into his garment.

I’d noticed it before - of course I had. It was impossible not to. Heavy. Dark. The black wolf symbol that looked like it carried the weight of something ancient, something that meant authority in a language older than speech.

I looked at it.

I looked up at his eyes.

And the world cracked open.

Oh my God.

I was on my feet before I even knew I’d moved.

Horror hit me first - pure, white, animal horror - and then everything else came rushing in behind it in a wave so large I couldn’t identify individual emotions anymore. There was just the wave. There was just the impact.

"H... how..." My voice wasn’t working right. My legs weren’t working right. I was staggering backward, my heel catching on nothing, and I felt the hot press of tears before I even understood I was crying. "You... you..."

My back hit the wall.

He killed my family.

He killed my family.

Everything the maid had been trying to say made sense now.

Uriel didn’t exist. Terrell did. The Alpha who fitted my description and who had a twin.

This man - this man who had looked at me with those kind eyes, who had sat with me and spoken to me and made me feel like someone worth protecting - this man had given the order that ended every life I had ever loved.

"You killed them." The words tore out of me like something bleeding. "You killed my sister. She just gave birth - she had a little baby boy - and you..."

He stood. Took a step toward me.

I flinched so violently I felt it in my spine.

He stopped.

Good. Good. He should stop. He should stay exactly where he was and never take another step toward me for as long as either of us lived.

"Angel..."

"Don’t." The word came out like a slammed door.

But he kept talking. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

I don’t know what I expected. Denial, maybe. Or cold indifference - that would have been easier, actually. Easier to hate something that showed no remorse. But instead his voice was low and unsteady and filled with something that sounded dangerously like anguish, and somehow that was worse.

He was saying something about how it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. That he hadn’t known my family was part of the pack he’d attacked. That by the time he knew - by the time he knew whose family his Luna came from - it was already over and there was nothing left to undo.

He was saying something about how the plan had been to bring me out of Hawkins and then release me. Set me free. That he’d never wanted to trap me.

He was saying something about falling in love.

He was saying my name like it hurt him.

And I stood against that wall and I felt every word land on me like stones dropped from a great height, and at some point - I don’t know when exactly - I stopped being able to hear him.

Not because he had gone quiet.

But because there was a roaring in my ears that drowned everything out. The roaring of every memory I carried - my sister’s laugh, my mother’s hands braiding my hair, the sound my father made when he was reading something that amused him - all of it rising up at once, all of it pressing against the inside of my chest demanding to be acknowledged. Demanding to be mourned.

They’re dead. They have always been dead. And he is the reason.

I don’t know how long he talked.

It felt like a very long time.

And then - very quietly, from somewhere I didn’t know I still had - I found one last thing.

"Get out."

Two words. Barely above a whisper. But something in the quality of my own voice frightened me, because I had never heard myself sound like that before. Not angry. Not hysterical. Just - done. Finished. Emptied of everything except the single, absolute need for him to not be in the same room as me.

He stopped talking.

The sudden silence was enormous.

He just stood there. And the seconds stretched and I felt my patience - the last fraying thread of it - begin to snap, and I raised my eyes to his face.

I don’t know what he saw there.

Whatever it was, it made him take a step back.

And then he left.

The door closed.

And I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor, knees drawn to my chest, and I pressed my face into my hands and I let myself fall apart in a way I hadn’t allowed since the day they told me everyone was gone.