Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint-Chapter 92

Angel’s POV

The rest of the journey was, mercifully, uneventful.

No arrows from trees. No ambushes from the riverside. No crawling snakes.

The road smoothed out as we moved further into Merrick’s territory, the landscape shifting gradually - the dense forest thinning to rolling land, villages appearing at intervals along the road. People glanced up as we passed and recognized Merrick with the easy familiarity of subjects who weren’t afraid of their lord, which I found myself noticing.

By the time the castle came into view I had stopped scanning the treeline.

Mostly.

Merrick’s castle looked exactly as I remembered it. Stone and height and the kind of beauty that announced itself without apology.

The gates opened before we reached them.

Word travelled fast here, apparently.

The courtyard was already populated by the time we rode in - staff appearing from various doors. Stable hands for the horses, household staff in their positions, the housekeeper standing at the front of the assembly like she’d been born there.

Merrick dismounted.

Came around to my side before I had fully worked out how to get down gracefully, and offered his hand with a natural sweetness.

I took it and descended without disgracing myself.

He kept my hand.

Turned to face the assembled staff.

"I imagine most of you remember our guest from few weeks ago," he started. "She has returned in a somewhat different capacity." He glanced at me briefly - something warm and private in it - then back to the staff. "This is my wife. Your mistress. She has my complete authority within these walls and you will treat her accordingly."

The silence that followed was - textured.

I watched it move through the assembled faces in a wave. The housekeeper’s eyebrows rose upward. Two of the younger maids exchanged a glance. A footman near the back blinked several times in quick succession.

The last time they saw her she was a guest. The Alpha’s supposed Luna.

A woman in borrowed dresses who had sat shyly at Merrick’s dinner table.

Now she was - apparently - the mistress of the house.

The housekeeper recovered first. "My lady." An incline of the head. "Welcome home."

The words landed strangely.

Home.

Merrick proceeded to drill them.

I stood beside him and watched him move through the staff with a firm voice - the mistress’s room was to be prepared, specific standards, specific preferences that he outlined with an attention to detail that showed he had been thinking about this - her comfort, her particular needs - for longer than just the ride here.

The quality of the sheets. The temperature of the room. That she was to be brought tea in the morning before anything else and the tea was to be a specific kind. That her meals were to account for her preferences, which he listed from memory. That she was never to be made to wait for anything she asked for.

I stood beside him and listened to him arrange my comfort with the precision of someone who had paid attention and I felt really moved beyond words.

How does someone like me end up here?

The thought terrified me. With my fat body that I had spent most of my life being reminded was too much. With my round face and my heavy bones. The girl who had been told that she could never find a husband, let alone a werewolf. Who had been mocked and insulted in different ways possible.

And yet.

Here was this castle. Here were these people, re-arranging themselves around my comfort. Here was this man - twomen, technically, which was still a sentence I was not entirely capable of thinking without needing to sit down - handsome and powerful and ancient and looking at me like I was something worth looking at.

A fat girl who was laughed at. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

And now I was standing in a castle being introduced as its mistress.

My life had changed overnight.

Literally overnight.

I wasn’t sure whether to be grateful or terrified, so I settled on both simultaneously and followed Merrick inside.

He took me up himself.

The room he led me to was not the guest room I had occupied before. Different wing, different corridor - larger, lighter, with windows that faced the gardens on one side and the open countryside on the other. The furniture looked clean and expensive.

There were books on the shelves.

I noticed that first, before anything else.

"I had them moved in last week," Merrick said, which meant he had arranged this before last night. Before the ceremony, before Claudia, before any of it was decided. He had prepared this room as though the outcome had already been written.

I looked at him.

He had the grace to look slightly caught.

"The blue ones on the second shelf are mine," he said. "I’d like them back when you’re done, but take your time."

I turned back to the room. The bed was enormous and looked like something you fell into and didn’t leave for days. The window seat had cushions. There was a writing desk with paper and ink.

This is mine, I thought.

"Freshen up," Merrick said. "Rest. I’ll send someone when dinner is ready." He moved toward the door. "You don’t have to come down if you’re not ready. I’ll have it brought up."

"Merrick."

He stopped.

"Thank you," I said. "For..." I gestured vaguely at the room, at the books, at the space that was mine. "All of it."

He looked at me for a moment with that expression he sometimes had - unguarded, quiet.

"Get some rest," he said gently.

And left.

Terrell’s POV

I watched them from the window.

I told myself I wasn’t watching. I was standing at the window of my study with a cup of something I hadn’t tasted in my hand, looking at the general direction of the courtyard, and it happened to be the moment when the gates were closing and the last of Merrick’s men were disappearing down the road.

Her horse was already gone.

I stood there for another moment looking at the empty road.

Then I set down the cup and turned away.

The problem with having nothing to direct your energy toward was that the energy went somewhere regardless, and where it went was generally nowhere useful. I knew this. I had centuries of experience with it.

I found Kane. Reviewed border patrol reports. Approved three land disputes that had been waiting on my desk for a week and probably could have been approved sooner. Walked the eastern perimeter with Bellick and discussed the maintenance of the outer wall.

All of it passed through me without leaving much behind.

By evening I had done a day’s worth of administration in four hours and was left with the remainder of the day, which I dealt with by sitting in the hall with my generals and pretending to be a man without a current situation.

It worked for awhile.

Then Kade, who had never once possessed the instinct for when not to speak, leaned back in his chair and said: "You know what I’ve been thinking about?"

"No," I said.

He said it anyway. "The whole sequence of events. From the beginning. It’s actually remarkable when you lay it out."

Gareth, who also should have known better, seemed to find this invitation rather than warning. "The Hound Pack siege," he said, with the nostalgic air of a man recounting a military operation that had gone reasonably well. "Start there."

"We destroyed the Hounds," Kade said, "which turned out to include Angel’s family, which none of us knew at the time..."

"Which launched the whole rescue operation," Bellick added.

"Which required Gareth," Kade said, looking at him with the expression of someone about to enjoy themselves, "to sacrifice his tent."

Gareth’s jaw moved. "We don’t need to talk about that."

"Your tent," Kade repeated, with great satisfaction. "You gave up your precious tent. For a woman who didn’t know you existed."

"I was forced..."

"Your tent, Gareth."

"The point," I said, mostly to stop Gareth’s expression from curdling further, "is that we retrieved her safely."

"And then," Kade continued, undeterred, "we made the single catastrophic decision to shelter at Lord Merrick’s castle because of rain."

Everyone was quiet for a moment.

"Rain," Bellick said.

"Rain," Kade confirmed. "We rode into Merrick’s gates because of weather. And somehow that single decision resulted in our Alpha being married." He looked at me with the expression of a man who finds the universe’s sense of humour impressive. "Without a wife."

"Married without a wife," Gareth repeated, as though the phrase required repetition to be fully absorbed.

"It’s a very specific condition," Kade agreed.

I looked at all three of them.

"If any of you are enjoying this," I said, "I’d encourage you to remember who controls your assignments."

They had the wisdom to rearrange their expressions.

Briefly.

"We don’t enjoy it," Bellick said. "It’s genuinely a terrible situation. We feel for you."

"Thank you, Bellick."

"It’s just also..."

"Bellick."

"Objectively remarkable," he finished. "As a sequence of events."

I let that go, because he wasn’t wrong.

We sat in silence for a moment, the kind of quiet required no filling.

Then Bellick said, with the tone of someone raising a thing he had been sitting on for a while: "Sheena."

The name landed differently than the others had.

"I’ve been thinking about it," he continued, "and I can’t settle on an answer. Was she genuinely confused? Did she actually misread the goddess’s message?" He looked at me. "Because I’ve known Sheena for years. And I have never once seen her misread anything."

The fire crackled.

I had been thinking the same thing since last night. Had been sitting with it underneath everything else. The unanswered question of exactly how much of last night had been genuine mistake and how much had been something else entirely.

I looked at the warrior standing near the far door.

He straightened immediately.

"Go and get the high priestess," I said.

He was gone before the sentence was finished.