Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint-Chapter 93

Alpha Terrell’s POV

They brought her in still wearing the smell of the dungeon.

Two guards held her, one on each arm, and Sheena between them looking nothing like the composed, robed priestess I had known for years. Her hair had come undone. Dust had gathered on her ceremonial clothes from the cell floor. She was shaking - the way a person shakes when they have been alone in the dark long enough for their mind to do its worst work.

When they pushed her forward she went down on her knees and didn’t stop there - she went all the way to the floor, both hands flat on the stone, forehead nearly touching them.

"Please. Please, I know what this looks like, I know you have every reason to... please don’t kill me."

I looked at her on the floor for a moment.

Then I said: "Get up, Sheena."

She pushed herself upright, slowly, and sat back on her heels. Her eyes were red. She looked at me with the expression of someone trying to read my next move.

"I’m going to ask you this question one last time. The smoke," I said. "In the ritual. Was its direction toward Merrick natural or was it manipulated?"

She opened her mouth.

"Think carefully," I said, "about what you’re about to say."

She closed her mouth. Looked at her hands. When she looked back up something had shifted - the last layer of it, the final defence, quietly laid down.

"Manipulated," she said.

The room was very quiet.

Kade, to his credit, said nothing.

"How," I said.

"A compound in the fire base. Before the ceremony began - I prepared the ritual fire myself, as always, and I introduced something that would cause the smoke to respond to the directional intent of the caster rather than the goddess’s pull." She said it flatly - like someone who has stopped fighting and just wants it over. "I directed it toward Lord Merrick."

"Why."

She looked at me then. "You know why," she said quietly.

"Say it."

"Because I wanted her away from you." No anger in it. No heat. Just... truth, finally, arriving at last. "If she belonged to Merrick, she would leave with Merrick. And things could..." She stopped. "I thought things could return to what they were."

"But you pushed me to go find her. You wanted her brought back here. You literally crawled and begged for her to be rescued."

"Because I didn’t expect you to fall for her. She wasn’t your type in the first place. You were supposed to just rescue her, then reject her yourself. Willingly. Without hesitation."

I sat with that for a moment.

So, that was it then. Simply because I gave in to some few moments of desire. Of pleasures that both of us clearly enjoyed. We were fuck buddies and that was it. I had never been careless with her - had never made promises, never suggested anything that wasn’t exactly what it was.

But I had not, apparently, been paying attention to what it was becoming on her side.

"And the declaration," I said. "That you were my true mate. The goddess communicated that?"

The look on her face was its own answer.

"Sheena."

"No," she said. "The goddess didn’t say it." Her voice was very small now. "I had prepared a spell. I had Angel’s hair - from her brush, and I had been working on a binding for days. The plan was to introduce it into the ritual at the right moment, make it seem like the declaration came from the ceremony itself." She looked at the floor. "But Claudia..."

"Claudia ended that plan before it started," I said.

"Yes."

"So you said it yourself. Without the spell. Without any support. Just... said it."

She said nothing.

I exhaled slowly. Looked at the ceiling briefly. Looked back at her.

"All these years," I said, "I thought we understood each other. I thought we both knew what it was and what it wasn’t." I shook my head. "I should have seen it."

"You didn’t want to see it," she said, and it wasn’t accusation - just honesty.

She wasn’t wrong.

I let that sit.

Then: "The attack on the road. When Angel was travelling here. The snake, and every other attempt." I watched her face carefully. "Did you arrange that?"

"No," she said. "Absolutely not. I... no."

I studied her.

She held the look with everything she had left, which wasn’t much but was enough to be legible.

I didn’t believed her. But there was a possibility she was also telling the truth.

Which meant that particular question was still open, still waiting, still somewhere out in the dark.

I stood.

"I’m not going to end your life tonight," I said. "The goddess had reasons for putting you in my court and I’m not arrogant enough to override that without understanding what they were." I walked toward the door, stopping beside her. "But you are a high priestess and apparently a practicing witch, and you have used both against my Luna, and I cannot have you loose in my territory right now."

She didn’t argue.

"Guards." I looked at the two men by the door. "Take her back. Post two men outside the cell around the clock. Nobody in or out without my direct word." I paused. "And tell the whole rotation - she’s not just a priestess. She’s a witch. Be careful what you accept from her. Be careful what she says. Be careful what you breathe near her cell."

The guards exchanged a glance.

I looked at them.

They stopped exchanging glances and moved.

Sheena rose from the floor with what remained of her dignity and walked between them without being pulled.

At the door she stopped.

"Terrell."

I waited.

"The herbs I gave her," she said quietly.

Something cold moved through me. "What herbs."

"I gave Angel - before the ceremony, I gave her something. I told her they were for..." She stopped. Looked at the floor. "I told her they were for weight loss."

The cold moved downward, into my stomach.

I crossed the room in an instant and was in front of her before she finished the exhale. "What was in them."

She flinched. "I didn’t intend... I didn’t tell her to take them right away, I only..."

"What was in them, Sheena."

"A paralytic compound," she said. "Derived from nightflower root and black moss. Slow acting. She’d have to consume the whole amount for..." She looked up at my face and stopped speaking.

I was already moving.

*****

Angel’s POV

The dinner they sent up was warm and delicious.

I ate at the window seat with the countryside spread out below me in the dark, the lights of the distant village visible on the horizon, and I felt - for the first time in long time, a peaceful quiet. To think.

I was still turning everything over. The beach. The ceremony. Claudia’s hands raised to the moon. The smoke that had moved and moved and moved again before arriving at an answer that had satisfied nobody.

And Sheena.

I thought about Sheena.

I had been so frightened on that beach when the guards took her - her voice rising, her composure breaking - and even in the middle of everything I had felt something pull at me that I couldn’t entirely justify. Because Sheena had been, before any of it, kind to me.

Through it all - the journey back, and everything that had followed after - she’d been really good to me.

On the day of the ceremony, she had come into my room.

She had sat with me.

Had spoken to me gently.

And she had given me the bag.

I pushed the dinner tray aside and reached into my travelling satchel.

The cloth bag was where I’d tucked it - small, and tied with a simple cord. Inside, were the herbs she’d described. Thirty of them, wrapped individually in leaves. One per day for a month.

The result will surprise you, she had said, with a small smile.

I held one between my fingers.

They looked harmless. Dark green, slightly waxy, the size of a large mint leaf.

I looked in the mirror across the room.

My reflection looked back.

I had been told - twice now, by two different men who had no reason to lie - that I was beautiful as I was. Merrick had been saying it from the very start. And Terrell, back when I had believed he was just Uriel - back when he had been my friend and not the source of my grief - had been angry at the mere suggestion I might want to change.

I looked at my reflection.

My full cheeks. My heavy arms. The soft weight of me that had been a source of shame for as long as I could remember.

I’m not doing this for them, I thought.

The decision wasn’t about what someone else wanted, not about fitting into someone else’s idea of what I should be. Just - mine. Small enough that when I looked in the mirror I would smile rather than flinch. Just enough.

For me.

I put the leaf in my mouth.

It tasted of green things and something faintly bitter underneath, the way medicine always tasted of medicine no matter how it was dressed. I chewed, swallowed, drank a long sip of water.

Then I changed into the sleeping clothes that had been laid out, climbed into the enormous bed, and let the warmth and the quiet and the exhaustion of the last several days pull me under.

***

A sharp pain woke me up.

It arrived all at once, from everywhere, a clenching in my stomach so sudden that I sat upright and had time to think something is wrong before the second wave hit.

I reached for the edge of the bed.

My hand didn’t move.

I looked at it.

It was there - my hand, my arm, exactly where they had been - but it refused to move. I tried again. The hand remained still. I tried to swing my legs over the edge of the bed and felt nothing happen.

A cold panic held me at that moment, cutting through the pain.

I can’t move.

I tried to call out - a name, any name, someone in the corridor...

My voice didn’t come.

I lay back - not by choice, my body simply falling back on the bed as the ability to hold myself upright left me entirely - and I looked at the ceiling above me and I felt the darkness pressing in at the edges of my vision.

The darkness pressed closer still.

And then it stopped pressing and simply...

Arrived.