Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint-Chapter 96

Alpha Terrell’s POV

I watched her go back under.

The sleep that took her this time was different - softer, more like rest. Her breathing evened out. The small tension that had lived in her face for seven days released itself, degree by degree, until she looked like a person sleeping rather than a person suspended.

She looked like herself.

I sat with that for a moment.

Then I carefully, slowly, lifted her head from my lap and transferred it to the pillow. She didn’t stir. I straightened the covers. I stood.

I looked at her one last time.

Merrick. What happened.

I turned and walked out.

Merrick’s study was at the end of the east corridor - a room I had always found faintly irritating in its elegance, everything arranged with the same deliberate eye he applied to his clothing and his manner and apparently his marriage.

He was at the desk when I came in, something spread out in front of him that he was reading with focus.

He looked up.

Read my face.

"She woke up," he said. Not a question.

"Briefly." I stopped in the center of the room. "She’s sleeping again. Proper sleep this time." I paused. "She’s going to be fine."

Merrick was already starting to rise.

"I’m leaving," I said.

He stopped halfway out of his chair.

"I’m sorry?"

"My work here is done. She’s recovering." I kept my voice even. "I’m going back to Black Wolf."

"You’re..." He straightened fully. "Terrell, she just woke up. She hasn’t even..."

"She’s going to wake up again in a few hours and she’s going to want you." I held his gaze. "So be there."

Something moved through his expression.

"What did she say?" he asked quietly. "When she woke up."

I said nothing.

Merrick looked at me for a long moment.

He walked toward the door.

I caught his arm as he passed.

He stopped. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

"Take care of her," I said quietly.

He looked at my hand on his arm. Then at my face. And I watched him understand - really understand, not just the surface of it - the whole weight of what I wasn’t saying.

"I will," he said.

I let go.

I walked away down the corridor and didn’t look back, which I was, by now, extremely good at.

***

Angel’s POV

The second time I woke up, the light was different.

Afternoon light, thick and golden, coming through the curtains at a low angle that meant several hours had passed since... since whatever the first time had been. I lay still for a moment and simply inventoried myself. Fingers - moving, good. Toes - there. The paralysis was clearly gone now, replaced by the deep bone-heaviness of someone who had been very still for a very long time and was just beginning to remember how to be otherwise.

I turned my head.

Merrick was in the chair beside the bed.

Not the chair that someone had been occupying - there were two chairs, I noticed, and the one closer to the bed had the look of something that had been lived in recently. A slight indentation. A blanket folded over the arm.

Merrick saw me looking and leaned forward.

"Good morning," he said. "Or afternoon, rather."

"What happened?" My voice came out rough and strange, like something that had been stored somewhere and needed airing out.

He told me.

All of it - the herbs, Sheena, the compound, the paralysis. He told me quietly and carefully and without softening any of the relevant facts, which I appreciated even as each one landed with its own weight.

Sheena.

I stared at the ceiling and thought about the woman who had been so kind to me since our journey back from Hawkins estate. The same woman who had spoken gently and pressed a small cloth bag into my hands.

She tried to kill me.

"She’s been taken care of," Merrick said, which told me enough.

I nodded.

Then he said: "Terrell arrived the day after you took the herbs. He rode through the night." He watched my face. "He carried you to the doctor himself. He stayed in this room for seven days administering everything the doctor prescribed." A pause. "He hasn’t left this room since he arrived. Until yesterday morning."

I looked at him.

"He was here?"

"In that chair." Merrick glanced at the worn one. "He slept there. When he slept, which wasn’t often."

I looked at the chair.

At the blanket folded over the arm.

At the depression in the cushion that meant someone large had been sitting there for a very long time.

"He’s..." I stopped. Made myself ask it normally. Casually. Like it was a practical question and nothing more. "Where is he now?"

"He left yesterday. When you first showed signs of waking." Something in Merrick’s voice was careful in a way I noticed. "He said his work was done."

I looked back at the ceiling.

I didn’t say anything for a long moment.

I didn’t ask why did he leave. I didn’t say he should have stayed. I kept both things behind my teeth where they belonged and I breathed in and breathed out and told myself I didn’t care, which was only partially true and getting less true by the second.

He rode through the night.

Seven days.

I pressed my hand flat against the covers and felt the quality of the room around me - warm, attended, the feeling of a space that had been occupied by someone who was paying close attention.

"He talked to her, you know," Merrick said, looking at the window.

"To who?"

"To you." He glanced at me. "While you were under. I could hear him sometimes, from the corridor. I didn’t listen." He held up a hand preemptively. "But he talked. A lot."

I had nothing to say to that.

"I’ll send the maid to help you freshen up," Merrick said, standing up. "And then I’ll come up myself and take you down to dinner. How does that sound?"

"That sounds..." I sat up slightly, and the room moved with me rather than against me this time, which was progress. "That sounds good. Thank you, Merrick."

He smiled and moved toward the door.

I pushed myself upright properly and reached for the pillow to rearrange it and my hand found something solid underneath it.

I stopped.

I pulled it out.

The Immense Pleasures of Gloria.

I sat there with it in my hands.

The same book. The same worn cover. The one Merrick had given me and Terrell had taken - on the grounds that he intended, in his words, to teach me the real thing. He had taken it from me with that intense look of future promises and he had kept it and now...

Now it was under my pillow.

Returned.

I turned it over in my hands.

Was that - did he change his mind? Had he decided, in those seven days of sitting in that chair, that the promise was no longer one he intended to keep?

Had he sat here for seven days and concluded that it was better to give the book back and leave quietly than to...

I looked at the chair.

At the blanket.

He left yesterday. When you first showed signs of waking.

I put the book on the bedside table.

I looked at it for a long moment.

Then I looked at the door he had walked out of.

I don’t care, I told myself.

The book sat there.

I don’t care.

***

Alpha Terrell’s POV

The Black Wolf gates opened before I reached them.

The courtyard assembled the way it always assembled when I returned from somewhere. I handed off the horse and walked inside and the familiar weight of the place settled onto my shoulders the way it always did.

Home.

I walked towards the throne room, where I met my generals already waiting.

Beta Kane was there - of course he was, Kane was always there, it was one of the things about him that I had stopped noticing decades ago the way you stop noticing the furniture. He came forward with a broad genuine warmth.

"Alpha." He placed a hand on my shoulder. "You look terrible."

"Thank you, Kane."

"Successful trip? You were gone longer than..." He looked past me. At the empty doorway behind me. Back at my face. "Where is your Luna?"

"She’ll come when she’s ready."

He looked at me.

He had known me long enough to know when to push and when to let it go. He let it go.

I walked to the throne and sat in it for the first time in over a week and felt the particular sensation of a thing that fits because it was made for you, which I did not find as comforting as usual tonight.

"Kane."

"Alpha."

"Bring me my sharpest sword."

The room went still.

The generals looked at each other. Two of the guards by the door looked like they’d rather be anywhere else right now.

Kane looked at me for a beat, absorbing the request and whatever was behind it, and then turned and went without asking who the sword was for.

Good man.

I waited.

The room waited with me.

"Bellick," I said, without urgency. "Go and bring me Sheena."

Silence.

I looked at the far wall.

"Go and bring me Sheena," I said again, and my voice was different the second time. In a dangerous way.

Gareth spoke.

"She’s dead, Alpha."

I turned my head.

He was looking at me with the expression of someone delivering news they had been rehearsing. Beside him, Kade had the look of a man who had already done his own calculations about how this moment was going to go.

"They found her in her cell last night," Kade said. "She..." He paused. "She did it herself."