Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Chapter 143: Chapter 143

Merrick’s POV

The question sat in the air longer than it should have. And I was suddenly aware of my own face doing something I hadn’t authorized, a flicker of doubt. What if you’re lying. The words themselves did not come out. What came out was the silence after them, the silence in which I should have answered instantly, automatically, with the complete certainty of a man who had no doubts.

I didn’t answer instantly.

Instead, different questions started flooding my head - what if grief had done something to her, months of carrying a loss too large to hold, and somewhere in that carrying, the mind had found a child who was the right age, and the wanting had become so total that it had stopped being able to distinguish itself from knowing. What if this wasn’t her son. What if this was a woman who needed it to be her son so badly that the needing had become indistinguishable from truth.

I looked at her, with my face still carrying the newfound doubt, and I felt the moment it happened - the specific moment Agnes saw it.

She stood up.

The chair went back with the force of the movement, scraping against the stone floor.

"He is mine," she said.

Her voice was not loud. It was a low, vibrating register of someone whose fury has compressed into something lethal.

"I carried him for nine months. I felt him kick under my ribs at three in the morning when I couldn’t sleep. I fed him from my own body. I know what it is to lose a child..." Her voice cracked, briefly, and then reassembled itself, harder than before. "I know exactly what that feels like, and I would never - never - put another woman through that pain just to fill the hole in myself. I am not that desperate. I am not that cruel."

The Luna stood too.

"I’m not accusing you of cruelty," she said, with the measured calm of someone holding her position. "I’m telling you what I need before I hand over a child I have come to love dearly. Proof. A witness. Something beyond your word." She held Agnes’s gaze without flinching. "Until then, he stays with me."

Agnes’s whole body had gone rigid.

I saw it building - the movement of someone whose control was reaching its absolute limit, the coiled stillness right before something breaks loose - and I was on my feet and moving before I had fully decided to move, because I knew, with the certainty of a man who had spent six days learning this woman’s edges, that whatever came next would not end well for her.

"My lady." I turned to the Luna first, "Forgive us. We’ll take our leave."

I held Agnes’s wrist.

"Let go of me..."

"Agnes." I kept my voice low, urgent, meant for just the two of us. "Not here. Not like this."

"She just called me a liar..."

"I know. We’re leaving. Now."

She fought me - not violently, but with the full weight of someone who did not want to be moved.

But then something in her seemed to recognize the futility of it, or perhaps simply the indignity of being dragged through a castle hall in front of guards, and she let herself be pulled, still rigid, still radiating fury with every step.

The moment we were clear of the doors, Agnes wrenched her hand from mine with a force that nearly took my balance with it.

"You said you’d fight," she said.

Her eyes were blazing. The tears from last night were nowhere in evidence - whatever had been soft in her face during that moment in my room had been replaced entirely by something with edges.

"You stood there and let her call me a liar."

"I didn’t..."

"You let her stand in front of me and tell me I needed proof that my own son is my own son, and you said nothing." Her voice was shaking now, not from sorrow, from something hotter than sorrow. "You promised me. You swore on your honor."

"Agnes, listen to me..."

"I am done listening..."

"Her condition is fair."

I heard myself say it before I had fully decided it was the thing to say, and I knew - even as it was leaving my mouth - that it was the wrong thing, the true thing and the wrong thing simultaneously.

"We can end this peacefully," I said, pressing forward because stopping now would be worse than finishing badly. "If we find a witness. Someone who knew the child, who can confirm..."

I saw it land.

I saw the exact moment the words reached her and her eyes darkened instantly.

Her expression shifted from rage into something colder and far more devastating, the fury burning down into something with no heat left in it at all.

"A witness," she said.

"Agnes..."

"How," she said, very quietly, "do you suggest I find a witness, Merrick?" She stepped toward me, and there was nothing soft in the movement, nothing of the woman who had raised her chin toward me the night before. "Your beloved brotherburned my village to the ground. He killed everyone who ever held my son. Everyone who watched me carry him. Everyone who could stand in a room and say yes, that is her boy." Her voice did not rise. It went the opposite direction - flatter, colder, more precise with every word. "My own sister never even saw him. Angel doesn’t know his face. There is no one left, Merrick. Terrell made certain of that. So tell me..." She held my gaze with something that cut. "Where exactly am I supposed to find this proof you and that woman seem to require?"

I felt every bit of her words sink in.

"I have nothing," she said. "No proof. No witness. I am completely, entirely alone in this."

"You’re not alone," I said, taking a step toward her to prove my point.

She stepped back.

"I knew I was alone," she said, "the moment I saw your face in there. The moment she said I might be lying and you didn’t say a single word in my defense. I saw it, Merrick. I saw the doubt." Her voice was very quiet now, and that was somehow worse than the shouting had been. "You looked at me like I might be a liar. Like I might be some grief-mad woman trying to steal another woman’s child." The look in her eyes felt like it was closing a door rather than opening one. "You didn’t have to say it. I saw it in your eyes."

I opened my mouth.

Nothing came out that was adequate to the moment.

She turned and went to her horse and mounted it. She did not look back at me, and within seconds she was through the gate and onto the road and gone, the sound of hoofbeats fading away.

I stood in the yard.

Alone.

I did not chase her.

This was its own kind of failure, I understood - that I stood there and let her ride off rather than mounting immediately and going after her - but something in me recognized that going after her right now, with the doubt she’d seen still fresh in both our minds, would only confirm whatever conclusion she had already reached.

I needed to give her something better than an apology.

I needed to give her the boy.