Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint-Chapter 80

Angel’s POV

The moment the last guard disappeared into the trees with Lyra and Merrick, Terrell grabbed my hand and started pulling me forward, moving towards the direction I’d just escaped from.

I fiercely pulled my hand, breathing hard.

Terrell stopped walking and turned toward me, with the slow deliberateness of someone who had been pushed to a particular edge and was still, just barely, choosing not to go over it.

"Come with me," his voice was dead quiet.

I held my ground.

"No."

Something shifted in his expression. "Angel..."

"I said no." I planted my feet in the cold mud and I looked at him directly and I felt the anger - which had been building since the moment he’d touched that crest and let me see the truth - finally arrive in full. Not the grief. Not the tears. The anger. Clean and hot and clarifying, burning away everything soft. "I’m not going anywhere with you."

"I won’t say it again."

"Then don’t." I took a breath. "What are you going to do, TERRELL? If I don’t follow you - what exactly are you going to do?" My voice cracked on the next words and I let it crack. "Kill me? The way you killed my family?"

He went very still.

"Because that’s who you are." I heard myself speaking and some distant part of me noted that I had never in my life spoken to anyone like this - not even Lord Hawkins - but the rest of me didn’t care even slightly. "That’s what you do. You take things. You destroy things. You leave nothing behind. Just ashes." My hands were shaking at my sides. "Everyone knows what you are. Every territory, every village, every person who has ever heard your name knows exactly what kind of monster carries that black wolf crest."

His face had gone completely unreadable - not blank, exactly, but locked down in a way that showed effort. His chest was rising and falling. His eyes hadn’t left mine.

"You want to seal a bond with me tomorrow night." I shook my head. "You want to stand me in front of your pack under a full moon and call me your Luna." The laugh that came out of me had no humour in it whatsoever. "I would rather die. I would rather spend the rest of my life scrubbing floors than bind myself to the man who murdered my entire family." I lifted my chin. "I was supposed to be a nun. That was my plan - my actual plan, before all of this. Dedicated work. Quiet service. A life that hurt no one." Something burned behind my eyes. "I was this close. And now I’m standing in a forest covered in mud arguing with a monster who thinks dragging me back to a locked room constitutes a relationship."

Silence.

Terrell looked at me for a very long moment.

And then, with the expression of a man who has made a decision and has no intention of revisiting it, he closed the distance between us in two strides, bent at the waist, and lifted me.

Over his shoulder.

The world inverted. Blood rushed to my head. My stomach made contact with what felt like a wall of solid muscle and I found myself staring at his back, at the dark fabric stretching across his shoulders, at the ground moving steadily beneath us as he simply walked forward.

"Put me down."

He walked.

"Terrell... put me down, I swear I’ll ..."

I kicked. Properly, with everything I had, my heel connecting with what I hoped was something painful.

He didn’t even break stride. Didn’t make a sound. Didn’t so much as adjust.

I kicked again.

Nothing.

I pushed against his back with both hands, which was approximately as effective as pushing against a wall that had decided to go for a walk.

"I am a person," I informed him furiously, "not a sack of grain..."

He adjusted his grip slightly, which settled me more securely, and kept walking.

I hit his back with the flat of my palm. Once, twice, and he walked through all of it like I was a light rain. Not cruelty. Not enjoyment. Just simple, absolute, immovable certainty.

Which made it worse.

I stopped hitting him.

I hung there, upside down over his shoulder in the dark, my hair falling forward and my dignity somewhere approximately thirty feet behind us in the undergrowth, and I looked at the ground moving steadily beneath his boots and I thought: this is genuinely happening.

He was carrying me. Back to the castle. And there was nothing - nothing - I could do about it.

The fury didn’t leave. But underneath it, in the small honest space I couldn’t close off, something exhausted and defeated pressed against the edges. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

I’m so tired.

Not just physically, though my feet were bleeding and my legs were shaking and I had been running for hours. Tired in a way that went deeper than that. Tired of running, tired of losing, tired of being the person who had everything taken and then had to find the energy to fight for the next thing too.

I was supposed to be in a convent. I was supposed to be somewhere quiet.

I stopped fighting.

I let myself go limp and stared at the passing ground and said nothing.

If Terrell noticed the change, he gave no indication.

He walked through the trees, through the eastern gate, through the village, past every face that had the wisdom to look away - and I catalogued each wasted landmark as we passed it. The gate where Lyra had used her pick. The wall we’d skirted through the undergrowth. The ground we’d covered at a dead run with our hearts in our throats.

All of it undone in ten minutes of being carried by a man who didn’t have the decency to even breathe hard.

He took the stairs without slowing. Corridor after corridor, and then the door to my room, which he opened with one hand while holding me with the other, which was frankly an unnecessary display of capability.

He set me down on the bed.

I scrambled immediately to the far edge and sat there, hands pressed flat on the coverlet, watching him.

He went to the windows. Checked the latches - one by one. Tested each one with a firm pull. Where the latch on the third window was slightly loose, he examined it for a moment before securing it with a technique that eliminated the looseness entirely.

Of course.

He checked the connecting door to the bathing chamber. Checked behind the screen in the corner. Moved through the room with the thoroughness of someone who has spent a great deal of time thinking about how people escape from spaces.

Then he stood in the center of the room and looked at me.

I looked back.

Neither of us spoke.

There was something in his expression - something underneath the locked-down blankness of it - that I couldn’t read and didn’t try to. I was too tired for reading expressions. I was too tired for anything except sitting on the edge of this bed and staring at him and waiting for whatever came next.

He held the look for a long moment.

Then he turned and walked out.

The lock engaged behind him.

He can lock every window and every door in this castle.

He cannot lock what’s inside me.

Terrell’s POV

I went to the kitchen myself.

Not because there was no one else to send. There were plenty of people to send - a dozen maids, half as many stewards, any one of the guards stationed in the east wing corridor. But I had already left her alone once today and look at how that had ended.

I was not making that mistake twice.

The kitchen went quiet when I walked in.

That always happened - the particular quality of silence that fell over a room when I entered it unexpectedly. Chopping stopped. Stirring stopped. The young boy turning the spit near the fire froze mid-rotation and stared at me with the expression of someone trying to remember if he’d done anything wrong recently.

The head chef, to her credit, simply looked up from the sauce she was reducing and met my eyes directly.

"Alpha."

"I need a dinner tray," I said. "Now."

She didn’t ask who it was for. She didn’t ask why I had come personally instead of sending word. She simply turned to her kitchen with the authority of a general and began issuing instructions. The room unfroze and moved, and inside of four minutes a tray was assembled on the central table.

Roasted meat. Bread, fresh from the evening bake. Soup in a covered bowl. Something sweet - dark preserve with sliced fruit. A cup of spiced something, warm.

I looked at it.

It was a good tray.

I picked it up.

****

The corridor outside Angel’s room was quiet.

I unlocked the door, went in, crossed to the table, and set the tray down.

She was on the bed - sitting upright now, watching me with eyes that were red-rimmed and exhausted and still, underneath all of it, carrying enough heat to burn.

I straightened.

Looked at the tray.

Looked at her.

There were things I could have said. There were things building behind my teeth that had been building since I’d stood in the center of that empty room and smelled the ghost of her scent fading into nothing - things that were not quite an apology and not quite an explanation and not quite a promise, some complicated combination of all three that I had no clean words for.

I said none of them.

"Eat," I said.

Then turned and walked out and locked the door behind me, and stood in the corridor for a moment with my hand flat against the wood and my eyes on the floor.

Then I went to find my brother.