Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Chapter 144: Chapter 144

Merrick’s POV

The moon told me it was midnight.

I knew this without checking - the angle of the light through the window, the silence that arrived at that specific hour when even the inn’s fire had reduced itself to ash.

I was lying on my bed fully dressed, staring at the ceiling, and I was not sleeping.

This was partly because I had a plan to execute in the next hour and sleeping felt like a crime. It was partly because the conversation in the yard kept replaying itself with persistence. The look on her face when she’d said I saw the doubt. The step back she’d taken. Mounting her horse and riding away.

And it was partly because of the sounds from the room next to mine.

I pressed my arm over my face and stared at the ceiling through it.

My heightened senses were, in moments like this, a curse.

Not loud - Agnes was not the kind of woman who cried loudly. She was, apparently, the kind of woman who cried with the same control she applied to everything else, which meant the sounds that came through the wall were quiet and contained and somehow, for that reason, worse to hear than anything loud would have been.

A sniff.

The shift of someone sitting on a floor rather than a bed.

I knew she was on the floor. I couldn’t have explained how I knew - the sound, perhaps, the specific acoustic of it. She was sitting on the floor of her room at midnight crying in pain, and I was in the room next door listening to every muffled moment of it.

I lay there for as long as I could stand it.

Which was, in the end, not very long.

I knocked once at her door.

No answer. A pause in the sounds. Like the pause of someone who has been heard doing something they wanted to do privately.

I opened the door anyway.

She was on the floor.

Exactly as I had known - sitting against the bed with her knees pulled up, in the dim light of the room’s single guttered candle.

She looked up at me.

Her face, in the candlelight, had the evidence painful agony.

She looked at me with the question she wasn’t going to ask.

"Get ready," I said.

She stared at me.

"We’re going to get him," I said. "Tonight. Right now."

The change in her face happened in different shades - disbelief first, then the fragile dangerous look of someone deciding whether to let themselves hope, then something that broke through everything else and was simply, completely, relief.

She stood.

She didn’t ask questions. She grabbed the few things she’d brought into the room. Her hands were not entirely steady but they were not slow.

She looked at me.

"Ready," she said.

The inn was quiet at this hour, but I was able to have the soldiers assembled in the yard fifteen minutes - not the whole camp, all of it would take too long and would wake the inn - but the key men, the ones I needed to speak to before we went.

They stood in the dark and I spoke quietly.

"We go in alone," I said. Looking at Agnes, then back at the men. "Just us and our horses, no escort."

The captain of the guard looked at me with the rapt attention, even though confusion was written across his face.

"You and the soldiers will ride out quietly after we’ve set out" I said. "You will wait in ambush outside. Somewhere around the treeline. When we come back, we’ll be moving fast and we’ll have the child. The Luna’s people will follow. When they do, you come out and you slow them down." I held the captain’s eyes. "You don’t have to hold them. Just buy us time. When we’ve got enough of a lead, you run. Every man for himself back to Black Wolf."

"My lord..."

"They will definitely outnumber you and your lives matter to me," I said. "I’m not asking you to die for this. I’m asking you to buy us twenty minutes and then save yourselves. Is that understood?"

The captain looked at me for a moment.

Then he nodded. "Understood."

I turned to the slave trader.

"You’re free," I said.

He blinked.

"The arrangement is over," I said. "Go. Now. Tonight." I looked at him steadily. "Go far, and go fast, because if the Luna’s people find you after tonight, I cannot protect you."

The slave trader grabbed my hand and pressed it, briefly, with the emotion of a man who had anticipated something much worse than freedom.

Then he went, quickly, into the dark, and I did not watch him go because there was no time.

I turned to Agnes.

She was already on her horse. I mounted mine immediately and we set out.

Agnes rode at my right and we didn’t speak to each other or looked at each other’s direction.

Soon after, the castle materialized from the dark and we rode more slowly and quietly.

"Stay here," I said.

"Merrick..."

"Agnes." I looked at her. "If I go in and you’re outside - you’re mobile. If something goes wrong, you can ride. If you’re inside with me and something goes wrong, we’re both caught and there’s no one to get the child out." I held her eyes. "Give me twenty minutes. If I’m not out in twenty minutes..."

"I’m coming in after you."

I looked at her.

"That’s not negotiable," she said.

I decided not to argue with things that weren’t worth arguing with. "Twenty minutes," I said. "Count it."

She nodded.

I went over the wall.

The guards were the first problem and I solved them quietly.

Two at the main entrance - the pressure point at the back of the neck and holding them quietly until they slipped into unconsciousness in few seconds.

I lowered them carefully to the floor. First guard down. Second guard down.

Two more at the interior corridor. Same approach. Slower, because the second one nearly heard me, and there was a moment of held breath and absolute stillness in the dark that went on longer than was comfortable before I was certain he wasn’t going to turn and find me.

Silence.

I moved into the castle’s interior and I listened.

Nothing from the nursery direction. This was a blessing - a sleeping child was a quiet child, and a quiet child was what I needed. I followed the route the nanny had come down from during our first visit.

The smell.

The same smell Angel had carried when she first arrived in our lives - a cookie fragrance dipped in vanilla.

Standing in the corridor outside the nursery, I noticed that the fragrance - not exactly the same, but related, the way a family resemblance appeared in features without being identical - was present here too. Even Agnes had an amount of it.

The boy was in there.

I opened the door.

It was quiet. Dim. The warm air of a room kept comfortable for an infant.

He was asleep.

I had expected - I don’t know what I had expected. Something that required more. But he was simply there, in the small bed, the round-faced solidity of a peaceful infant.

I looked at him for a moment, then I picked him up without hesitation.

He stirred - the small motion of someone being moved from one state to another - and I shifted him against my chest to support his fragile neck.

He didn’t wake.

The window was my first thought - the door meant the corridor, meant the path that led past the unconscious guards, and while I was fairly confident in the guards’ states, the window was faster and more certain. I assessed it: one story up, the yard below, a surface that was manageable for someone who wasn’t carrying a child.

I was carrying a child.

I went to the window anyway, looked down, made the calculation - the distance was fine, the landing was clear.

I went over the sill with the boy held against my chest and dropped.

Landed. One knee to absorb it. Upright. The boy slept on, indifferent to everything happening around him which I found genuinely impressive.

I ran.

Agnes saw me coming.

I knew this because she had both horses turned in the right direction and was already leaning forward in her saddle before I had covered half the distance between the wall and the road. When I reached her, her eyes went to the bundle in my arms and I watched something happen in her face that I couldn’t describe.

I held him toward her.

Her hands shook.

They shook as she took him.

And then they stopped shaking, because he was in them, and something in her hands seemed to recognize what they were holding and simply - settled.

She pressed her face to the top of his head.

One breath. Two.

"Agnes," I said quietly. "We need to go."

She looked up at me over the top of her son’s head with the expression of someone who has been given back something they had stopped letting themselves believe they would find.

"I know," she said. "Let’s go."

We mounted.

We rode.

The castle behind us was still quiet, which meant we had minutes, which meant we needed to use them completely. I pushed the horse to its capacity and Agnes rode beside me with the boy held against her chest and the road unspooled ahead of us in the dark and somewhere behind us in the treeline I knew the soldiers were waiting in the dark for what came next.