Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Chapter 139: Chapter 139

Angel’s POV

He was taking a long time in that bath.

I had left the bed and sat by the fire, listening to the sounds from behind the curtain and I thought: men have a reputation for punctuality in most things and apparently bathing is the exception, because this was taking considerably longer than it needed to and every minute of it was a minute I was sitting in his chair in his room with the fire and the sounds and all the thoughts I had run out of room to avoid.

I looked at the ceiling, attempting to count the designs and symbols.

Then the curtain moved.

I turned.

And then I turned back. Quickly. Blushing from ear to ear.

The fire was very interesting, and I kept my eyes trained on it.

It was doing things fire did - the movement of it, the patterns of something that was alive in the way fire was alive, consuming and producing simultaneously. I found all of it extremely absorbing. I looked at it with the focused attention of a woman who had absolutely nothing else occupying her awareness.

"You can look," he said. "If you want."

"I’m fine," I said. To the fire.

"I’m your husband."

"I’m aware."

"All of it belongs to you."

The fire continued to be very interesting.

"I’m aware of that too," I said.

A pause.

Then the sounds of him moving to the wardrobe - the opening of it, the quiet sound of someone selecting clothing, the small sounds of a person getting dressed that I was apparently now able to hear with my heightened senses.

I sat with my eyes on the fire and my hands in my lap and the very vivid, very complete, entirely unwelcome image of what I had seen in the half-second before I turned away, and I made a private resolution to be faster next time.

There won’t be a next time, I told myself.

He’s your husband, said the other part of me.

Just then there was a knock, and the food arrived like a rescue.

Maids came in with varieties of food that smelled like heaven, and it was arranged on the side table. The room was instantly filled with the smell of it and I felt my body getting pulled towards the food.

Terrell pulled a chair.

"Come sit," he said.

I quietly stood from my position by the fire and sat on the outstretched chair.

He sat opposite me.

"Eat please. I hope you enjoy it." he said.

I ate.

I ate with the hunger of someone who had been running on an empty stomach all day, which was literally true. The food was hot and it was good and I did not say anything for several minutes because the food required my full attention and I was giving it.

Terrell ate too, but he was eating while focusing on me.

I could feel him watching.

I let him watch.

I ate another portion and I thought about my newly acquired strength and heightened senses.

"Tell me," I said.

He stopped eating.

"How did I survive that stab?" I said. "What did you do? What’s happening to me?" I looked at him across the table. "Tell me all of it."

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he set down his fork and gave me his full attention.

"I gave you my blood," he said.

I held his gaze. In shock.

"When you were unconscious. When you were..." He stopped. Started again. "There was no other option, Angel. You were bleeding and the wound was..." His jaw moved. "I made a decision without your permission and I understand what that means and I’m not..." He paused. "I gave you my blood. Alpha blood. And it started a process."

"What process," I said.

"Transformation," he said.

The fire behind me made a sound.

"It takes time," he said. "It’s not - it doesn’t happen at once. It happens in stages, over days and weeks, and you start to notice things first before the rest of it catches up. Senses." He looked at me carefully. "Strength. Hearing. Speed, eventually. The healing you felt - that was the first sign."

I thought about hearing him bathe through a curtain without trying.

I thought about my strength on the cliff.

"Will I become..." I stopped. "Am I going to be..."

"A werewolf," he said. Simply. Not softening it. "Yes. Eventually. Not all at once. But yes."

I looked at my hands, and thought about what this new change will mean for me.

I put them flat on the table.

"You’ve altered my entire life," I said.

"I know."

"Without asking me."

"Yes." He said, without flinching from the truth of it. Just: yes. "I know."

I thought about Agnes. My only surviving family.

How I would explain this to her. Agnes, who had survived a burning village and slave traders and had come to Black Wolf with the specific mission of extracting me from it, and I was going to have to tell her that I was becoming one of the things she had decided to hate with every part of herself.

I thought about the life I had been going to have. The convent, before all of this - the quiet, the order, the peace of a life that had its shape and stayed in it. How far from that shape I had traveled. How completely.

"Say something," Terrell said.

I looked up.

He was watching me with an expression I had identified down that cliff. Fear. I could see it in the slight tension of him, the way he was holding himself with the care of someone bracing.

"I don’t know how to react," I said.

"That’s fair."

"You saved my life," I said. "And you did it by changing everything about me without asking." I held his eyes. "Both of those things are true at the same time."

He nodded.

"And now you’re sitting there," I said, "looking at me like you’re afraid of what I’m going to say."

"I am afraid of what you’re going to say," he said, completely honest.

"Are you going to ask me again if I want to leave," I said.

Something moved through his face.

"Do you?" he said.

I looked at him.

"No," I said.

I picked up my fork.

I ate the rest of my meal and I did not look at him and I felt him looking at me all through the meal. I doubt he tasted his food at all.

After dinner, the maids came to clear everything away.

Now, it was just me and him and the large bed looking at us.

"Take the bed," he said, stepping out from behind me. "I’ll take the cushion."

"That’s not necessary," I said.

He turned and looked at me.

"It’s large enough," I said. "And you were nailed to a cross tonight. You should sleep in your own bed."

"Angel..."

"Stop arguing," I said. "Get in the bed."

A pause.

"Are you sure."

"I said stop arguing."

He looked at me for a moment with the expression of someone who was not accustomed to being told to stop arguing by someone significantly smaller than him and was finding the experience - not unpleasant. Then he came to the bed and I got under the duvet and he got under the duvet and the room held the quietness of two people being very aware of each other in a small space.

"Can I hold..." he started.

I didn’t answer.

I moved.

Backward, into the warmth of him, into the solid presence of him - and his arms came around me like he had been waiting for permission and had just received it, and the embrace closed, and the room went quiet.

Home, said something inside me, without being asked.

I lay very still inside that word.

It felt like home.

Merrick’s POV

Five searches.

Five families, five doors, five babies who were not the right baby, and Agnes - Agnes who had stood at the inn wall and turned away so I couldn’t see her cry, who had gotten better at containing it by the third, who by the fifth had gone so still and so quiet afterward that the silence felt like grieve.

The fifth one had been a girl.

Agnes had looked at the child for a long time before she turned away, and she hadn’t said anything for two hours of riding after, and I had matched her silence because it was what the silence required.

The sixth lead came from the slave trader the next morning - early, before breakfast. He looked like a nervous man who had been thinking overnight about the consequences of not being useful.

"A castle," he said. "In the Northern Territory. The Luna there had wanted a son. I sold her a boy." He looked at me, then at Agnes.

Agnes was already on her horse.

The Northern Territory had a different quality from Black Wolf’s lands - older, somehow, the cold more fierce, the trees spaced out in large gaps. The castle at its center was not large by Alpha standards but looked like a place that had been there long enough.

The Alpha who met us in the courtyard was smiling warmly at our arrival.

He welcomed us with opened arms and listened to our case.

He was courteous and pleasant. A man who loved peace indeed.

The Luna was another matter.

She appeared when summoned - a woman with the quiet force of someone who had learned that force did not require volume - and she listened to everything I said with rapt attention.

When I finished, she shook her head.

"I won’t produce the child," she said. The voice of someone who had made a decision and wasn’t backing down.