Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Chapter 146: Chapter 146

Angel’s POV

I said his name like I was guilty.

"Merrick."

The word came out smaller than I intended - the trembling words of someone who has been caught in a very bad situation.

I pulled the covers up slightly, which was a completely useless gesture given that I was fully clothed, but my hands needed something to do.

Merrick stood in the center of the room, taking in the scene, completely forgetting what he’d been saying earlier.

I thought about what he must be thinking.

The weeks in his castle - weeks during which I had been careful, had maintained my distance, had never once moved toward him in the way a wife moved toward a husband. He had been nothing but respectful of that. He had never pushed, never asked, never made me feel the weight of the expectation. And now he had ridden for over a week and returned in the middle of the night and walked into his brother’s room to find me in his brother’s bed.

I could understand, with painful clarity, why that would hurt.

I could not stay in this room any longer.

"I should go see Agnes," I said. I was already moving the covers, retrieving my robe from wherever Terrell had put it with the speed of someone who had identified their exit and was taking it. "She just got back with the baby and I haven’t seen either of them yet, and..."

I was already at the door.

"Angel..." Terrell’s voice.

"Good night," I said. To both of them. To the room.

I went out.

I walked fast.

Not quite running, but the brisk pace of someone who needed to put much distance between themselves and their husband. I half-expected footsteps behind me. Neither set came, and I released a breath I had been holding since the moment Merrick had walked in.

Agnes’s door - my door, the room that had been mine since arriving at Black Wolf - had light under it.

I opened it.

She was standing in the center of the room.

Agnes, who had left this castle days ago with nothing but determination and the slave trader’s information and a soldier’s escort, was standing in my room at midnight with a baby in her arms, making the soft nonsense sounds that people made at infants.

The boy was awake.

He was looking up at Agnes with the wide, considering eyes of a child who was deciding what to make of the world, and the world he was currently making was apparently satisfactory, because he was smiling - the gummy, cute smile of a very handsome baby boy.

Something broke open in my chest.

I crossed the room and stood beside her and looked at him - really looked, with all the attention I had - and he looked back at me with those eyes that were Agnes’s eyes and also, around the jaw, something that belonged to our mother, the specific set of it, and I felt the warmth of him and the realness of him and the grief of all the months of not knowing how he looked.

"Oh," I said. Which was not a word so much as a sound.

Agnes turned to look at me.

Her face, in the room’s low light, looked like she was feeling something too large to arrange into expression

"He’s beautiful," I said.

"He is," Agnes said. Quietly.

We stood beside each other and looked at him.

The grief came, briefly - the one that arrived when something good happened in the context of everything that had been lost. Papa. Mama. The village, the people, the whole world of before that would not be coming back. I felt it move through me and I let it, because pushing it down entirely was not something I had the capacity for in this particular moment, and because Agnes was beside me and she was feeling it too, I could tell, the same grief in a different body.

I pressed it down after a moment.

Later, I thought. There were many things for later tonight.

"Has he eaten?" I asked, reaching out to touch the boy’s cheek with one finger.

He grabbed my finger.

The grip of him - the surprising, determined, confident grip of an infant who has decided that this finger belongs to him now - undid something in me completely. And suddenly, I wanted to have my own child.

"I fed him," Agnes said. Something moved through her voice. "I thought... I was afraid that after everything, my breast milk would be..." She stopped. "But the moment I had him back in my arms, I felt it. Like my body remembered what it was for."

I looked at her.

She was looking at the boy with the expression that had no name - the look of a mother who has been separated from her child and has been given him back, who is looking at him and cannot quite stop confirming that he is real.

I put my arm around her.

She leaned into it.

We stood like that until he began to drift - the eyes going heavy, the grip on my finger loosening slightly, the look of a child giving in to sleep.

"No," I said, instinctively.

Agnes almost smiled. "Angel."

"He can sleep in a minute, I’ve only just met him..."

"He needs to sleep."

"Just a little longer..."

But his eyes were already closed, the smile still faintly present in the curve of his mouth, and there was no negotiating with the sleep of a baby who had decided.

Agnes laid him down with the carefulness of someone who had done this before and had come back to it the way you came back to a language you thought you had forgotten.

She stood up.

She looked at me.

She took my hands.

"Come outside," she said.

The corridor was quiet.

Agnes turned to face me. She still had my hands. She looked at me with seriousness.

"Where were you?" she said. "When we got back. Where were you?"

I looked at her.

I thought about lying - the various available lies I could tell her at this moment. I also thought about how she could see through me better than anyone alive and how she’d just returned from a very trying journey. She deserved honesty from the only family she had left.

"Terrell’s room," I said.

Agnes’s hands, still holding mine, went very still.

"His room," she said.

"Yes."

She looked at me.

She looked at me for long enough that I watched a cold realization dawn on her face.

"Angel," she said. Very quietly. "Tell me you haven’t fallen for him."

I held her gaze.

I said nothing.

Which was, in the language of sisters who had known each other their entire lives, an answer.

Agnes’s eyes widened. Not with surprise - with the look of someone who had suspected and had been hoping they were wrong and had just discovered they were right.

"Oh no," she said.

"Agnes..."

"Oh no." She dropped my hands. I watched her work to keep her emotions contained, the jaw tight, the breath controlled. "After everything I said to you. The morning I left. I told you..."

"I know what you told me."

"He killed our family, Angel..."

"I know that."

"Then how..." She stopped. Her voice had gone quiet in the way that was worse than the shouting. "How can you stand in his room and let him - how can you look at his face and not see..."

"I see everything," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. "I see all of it. I haven’t forgotten. I haven’t forgiven anything." I met her eyes. "I also can’t explain what’s happening to me when I’m near him and I don’t know yet what to do with that."

"I can tell you what to do with it..."

"Agnes." I put my hand on her arm. "You just got back. You’re exhausted. You’ve been on the road for a number of days and you just got your son back tonight and there is so much to talk about, all of it." I looked at her. "But not tonight. Please. Tonight is just for him. For you and him."

She looked at me.

Her jaw was still tight. The anger was still there, barely contained, the fury of adhering to her warnings.

But underneath it - the exhaustion. The relief. The boy asleep in the room behind us.

She inhaled.

Exhaled.

"We talk tomorrow," she said flatly.

"Tomorrow," I agreed.

She looked at me for one more moment, and then she went back into the room.

I found a maid.

The castle’s night staff moved quietly through the corridors, and the maid who found me was young and accommodating. I needed a spare room. I couldn’t bring myself to sleep in same room with Agnes tonight, I couldn’t go back to Terrell’s room, and I very well couldn’t stand in this cold corridor until dawn.

The maid took me to a room two corridors away from my own.

Moderate. Clean. A fire that she built up from the existing embers. Covers turned down, a candle lit, the windows secured.

I thanked her.

She left.

I lay on the bed and looked at the ceiling.

The ceiling of the spare room was different from Terrell’s ceiling and different from my own.

I thought about Agnes’s face. Have you truly fallen for the devil.

I thought about the boy’s grip on my finger, and how seeing him made me crave for my own baby.

I thought about Merrick standing in the room with that hurtful expression.

I thought about what I was now.

Terrell’s blood in my veins. The strength in my hands on the rope. The hearing that I had been navigating for four days now. The healing.

The fact that I was slowly metamorphosing into a werewolf and my sister had no idea about it.

What would she do when she finds out? How would she feel? She had no idea what I and Terrell had gone through in her absence, but would she understand that it needed to be done? To keep me alive?

The questions sat in the dark with me, and the ceiling had nothing to offer, and I was still turning it over when the door opened.

I sat up immediately, suddenly scared for my life, and prepared for whatever was sent to kill me this time.