Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint-Chapter 95

Alpha Terrell’s POV

The doctor gave us everything he had.

Medicines in small brown bottles with instructions written carefully. Ointments for the skin - paralysis, he explained, when prolonged, stopped the body from making its small unconscious adjustments, and the skin suffered for it. A tonic to be administered in drops on the tongue every four hours. A compress for the chest, warmed, changed twice daily.

I listened to every word.

Merrick listened beside me, his arms folded, and for the first time in his life, he looked serious. He asked two questions that were good questions, which I noted without comment.

We paid the doctor more than he asked for, took everything he had to give, and left.

After we arrived back at Merrick’s castle, I carried her up the stairs myself.

Not because there wasn’t anyone else available - Merrick’s household had assembled down the hall - but because the idea of anyone else’s hands on her right now was something my body simply refused to accept.

She was the same weight she had always been.

That was what I kept coming back to, in the strange logic of crisis - the same weight, the same warmth, the same vanilla scent in her hair. Everything about her externally unchanged. And yet the person behind the face was - somewhere else. Suspended in whatever the compound had put her inside, waiting to come back.

Come back, I thought. Come back.

I laid her down on the bed with extra care, straightened the covers, and stood there.

Merrick appeared in the doorway.

"You can go, if you want," he said. "I’ll take care of her. I’ll make sure someone is with her every..."

I turned and looked at him.

He stopped.

"That," I said, "is how you’ve been taking care of her? For a whole day she was lying in that bed and you didn’t once go and check?"

"I told you, I didn’t want to disturb..."

"She was paralyzed, Merrick." I kept my voice low because I was in a room with an unconscious woman and I had some restraint, though not much. "Not sleeping. Not resting. Paralyzed. And your approach to her wellbeing was to leave her alone because you didn’t want to be intrusive."

"I was trying to give her space..."

"There’s a difference," I said, "between giving someone space and being so determined to be the gentle option that you stop paying attention to whether they’re actually alright."

His jaw tightened. "I care about her..."

"Then show it differently." I turned back to the bed. "If you had felt anything - if you had been in this room even once since she fell asleep - you would have known something was wrong before it had to get worse."

Silence.

"You can’t just..."

"I’m staying, Merrick," I said. "In this room. With her. Until she’s fully awake and well." I finally looked at him again.

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he looked at Angel on the bed.

Then back at me, and something shifted in his face.

"You’ve changed," he said quietly.

I didn’t answer.

"I’ll have the doctor’s instructions written up for the household staff," he said. "And I’ll have your things sent up to your room."

"I don’t need a separate room."

He blinked. "You’re seriously going to sleep in here?"

"Someone needs to be with her every hour." I pulled the chair to the bedside. "It might as well be someone who will actually notice if something changes."

Merrick looked at me with an expression I hadn’t seen from him in a long time.

"Alright," he said simply.

And left.

The days that followed turned out to be something I hadn’t expected.

I had fought wars. I had sat through sieges that lasted weeks, through the long grinding patience of waiting for outcomes that were not yet decided. I knew how to endure time.

This was different.

This was a room. A woman in a bed. The small repeated routine of care delivered on a schedule that the doctor had written out and I had memorized before I’d finished reading it.

Every four hours: the tonic. Four drops on the tongue - I learned quickly that the angle of her head mattered, that too far back and it didn’t absorb properly, that the right position was just slightly tilted, supported by my hand.

Twice daily: the compress. Warmed in a basin of hot water, laid across her chest, replaced when it cooled. The maids offered to do it. I let them help with the warming but kept the placing for myself, which I didn’t examine too closely.

The ointment: her hands, her feet, along the backs of her arms where the skin showed the first evidence of what prolonged stillness did. I applied it carefully and systematically and tried not to think about the fact that I was touching her hands, which I had touched once under false pretenses on a night that felt like a different century.

I talked to her.

This had not been the plan. The plan had been silence and vigilance and awaiting her recovery. But on the second night, somewhere around the third hour of sitting in the dark with the fire low and the castle quiet and nothing to listen to except her breathing, I found myself talking.

Nothing consequential at first. The logistics of border management. A territory dispute that Gareth had been handling in my absence. The stubbornness of the eastern wall’s northern section, which kept developing the same crack in the same place regardless of how many times we repaired it.

Then, gradually - other things.

"The first raid I ever led," I said, on the third night, to the ceiling and to her, "I was twenty-three years old and I was terrified and I couldn’t let anyone know I was terrified because I was the Alpha and the Alpha was not terrified." I looked at her face. The complete stillness of it. The way the firelight moved across it. "I was sick before we rode out. Physically sick, around the back of the stables where no one could see. Merrick found me anyway. He always did."

I looked at her hands, folded on the covers.

"He didn’t say anything. He just stood there and waited until I was done and then handed me a cloth and said you can be terrified and still do the thing and then walked away." I paused. "I’ve been furious at him this week and I keep remembering that moment and it makes it complicated."

Her breathing, in and out.

"You would have found that funny," I said. "I think."

On the fourth night I told her about the first century. The loneliness of it. The long strange experience of watching everyone around you find their fated mate, age, change and end while you simply...continued. How I had learned to hold people at a slight distance because the alternative was too costly. How Merrick was the only person I had never learned that distance with, because he continued alongside me and there was no distance to manufacture.

"And then you walked into a room, screaming and aiming to kill me," I said, "and that was - that was the end of the distance, apparently. Without my permission. Without any warning whatsoever."

I looked at her.

"I’m aware this is easier to say when you can’t respond," I said. "I want you to know that I’m aware of that."

Merrick came twice daily.

He stood at the foot of the bed and looked at her and said very little. On the third day he brought the blue-spined books from her shelf and set them on the bedside table without comment. On the fifth day he sat in the chair I wasn’t using and stayed for an hour.

We didn’t argue.

We barely spoke.

It was the most peaceful we had been with each other in weeks, which was a grim kind of irony that I suspected neither of us would acknowledge out loud.

On the sixth evening he brought food for me as well as for her tray.

"You need to eat," he said.

I ate.

"She’s going to be alright," he said, after a while.

I didn’t answer.

"I believe that," he said. "For what it’s worth."

I looked at him across the bed. "It’s worth something," I said.

He nodded once. Stood up. Left.

The seventh morning.

I had been awake since before dawn - the sleep I managed in this room was light and fractured, the kind that kept one ear always open. I was sitting with my back against the headboard and her head in my lap, my hand moving through her hair the way it had started doing somewhere around day three without my fully authorizing it.

It helped, the doctor had said. Familiar sensation, familiar voice. Something for the consciousness to surface toward, wherever it was.

So I had talked and I had run my fingers through her hair and I had administered tonics and changed compresses and sat in the dark and waited.

The morning light was coming through the curtains in long pale strips.

I was looking at the window.

I felt it before I saw it - the very slight change in the weight of her head against my thigh. A shift. Something moving.

I looked down.

Her eyes were opening.

Not all at once - slowly, the way eyes open when the person behind them is surfacing from somewhere very far down. Gradual, effortful, the flutter of lashes and then the first grey morning light finding them and then...

Her eyes.

Open.

Looking up.

The thing that happened in my chest was not something I have a word for. Not relief - though it was that. Not joy - though it was that too. Something larger than both. The feeling of watching something you had been holding your breath about for seven days simply... happen.

I was smiling before I knew I was smiling.

"There you are," I said softly.

She blinked. Once. Twice. Her eyes moved - taking in the ceiling, the room, the light - like she was reassembling the world.

Then she looked up at me.

I watched her focus find my face.

And then she voiced out;

"Merrick." Her voice was barely there, rough with disuse, barely a whisper. "What... what happened?"

I looked at her.

At her eyes finding the wrong face in mine. At the relief in them that was not for me.

I kept my hand in her hair.

I kept the smile where it was, but the pain I felt at that moment was too painful to bear.