Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Chapter 100

Merrick’s POV

I returned by seven and knocked on Angel’s door.

"I’ll eat up here," she said through the door, before I’d finished knocking.

"Open the door, Angel."

A pause. Then the door opened and she was already dressed for dinner in the way of someone who had been dressed for a while and had been sitting in their room trying to convince themselves they didn’t want to go down.

"I’m not very hungry," she said.

"You’re always hungry. I’ve watched you eat." I stepped back from the door and gestured down the corridor. "We’re a family now. Whatever else is complicated can be resolved. But at the dinner table, we are a family. Come."

She looked at me for a moment, like she was seriously considering her options.

Then she came.

The dining room was lit and warm and smelled of delicious well-cooked meals.

Terrell was already seated.

He looked up when we entered - at me first, then at Angel, and the look lasted exactly as long as necessary for acknowledgment. Then he looked back at the table.

"Brother," I said, taking my seat.

"Merrick." He reached for his wine.

Angel sat across from him with her back straight, her hands in her lap, her eyes finding the neutral territory of the table between them.

I poured her wine, and tried to make dinner as lively as possible.

"How was the journey?" I asked her. "Looking back - was the second day worse than the first, or did you find your riding lessons taking effect by then?"

She looked at me with the faint smile. "The second day was better," she said. "I stopped fighting the horse and started listening to it."

"That’s the whole secret," I said. "Half of horsemanship is simply stopping arguing."

"You could have told me that three weeks ago."

"You wouldn’t have believed me three weeks ago. You needed to discover it yourself."

She almost smiled.

I glanced at Terrell.

He was cutting his meat with the serious determination of a man performing a task that required his complete attention, despite the fact that cutting meat required approximately none.

"The black wolf stallion you put me on," I said to him, "on the south training ground. Is he still giving the handlers trouble in the mornings?"

Terrell looked up. The normal question had done what I intended - bypassed whatever was operating in him and reached the part that functioned on ordinary ground. "He’s settling," he said. "Kane moved him to the eastern stable. The change in handler seems to have helped."

"Good horse," I said. "Bad temperament."

"He just needed to stop being handled like a problem."

"Some things do," I said pleasantly, looking at neither of them in particular.

Terrell looked at his plate.

Angel moved her fork to the left side of her plate.

I ate my dinner and kept talking - about the horse, about the pack business I’d brought to Terrell’s attention, about a story involving Gareth and a goat at the last territorial summit that I had been saving for a suitable occasion. I talked with the warmth of a man filling a room with something so that the silence didn’t settle and crystallize into something harder to break later.

Terrell responded when I directed at him. Short and straightforward.

Angel responded when I directed at her. Longer than short, and once or twice with a relaxed energy.

They did not speak to each other.

Not once.

They did not look at each other directly.

Not once.

The food between them might as well have been a wall.

I watched them and thought: two of the most stubborn people I have ever encountered in a very long life, sitting six feet apart, both of them determined to look at everything in this room except each other.

Then Terrell set down his napkin.

"I have business to attend to," he said, to the table rather than to either of us. He stood. "Good evening."

And he left.

The door closed behind him.

Angel stared at her plate.

I watched her pick up her fork. Set it down. Pick it up again. Move a piece of food from one side of the plate to the other with the zeal of someone who needed something to do with their hands.

"Alright?" I said.

"Yes."

I gave it a moment.

"Why did you really come, Angel?"

She looked up.

"You mentioned Sheena this afternoon," I said. "And I let that go because I thought you needed time. But now..." I gestured at the door Terrell had just walked through. "You’ve barely eaten. You’ve barely spoken. You’ve been somewhere else since the moment we came down for dinner, and I don’t think it’s grief about a woman who tried to kill you."

She was quiet for a long time.

The fire crackled.

"Sheena," she said finally. Firmly. "That was the reason. I just needed to talk to her. Ask her some questions."

I looked at her.

She looked back with the steady eyes of someone who had decided on a story and was standing in front of it.

"Alright," I said.

"I’m sorry the dinner wasn’t..."

"Don’t apologise." I stood and collected my wine. "Would you like me to take you up?"

"I think I’d like some air first." She looked toward the far window, beyond which the garden was a dim shape in the evening. "The garden. I’ve never actually been in it properly."

"I can come..."

"I’m alright on my own." The first fully unguarded thing she’d said all evening. "I’d like the quiet."

I nodded. "Call a maid if you need anything. The night air gets cold quickly here."

She was already standing.

***

Angel’s POV

Stupid.

I walked down the corridor toward the garden doors and the word followed me at each step like a heel catching on stone.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

What had I expected? Some version of events in which I arrived and he - what? Smiled at me? Said my name the way he usually says it, like it means so much to him. Looked at me the way he had for three seconds on the staircase before the shutters came down and he walked away?

He had looked straight through me at dinner.

Six feet of table between us and he had spoken to every surface in the room except my face.

You rode three days for this. I pushed through the garden door and the night air hit me immediately - cold, clean, smelling of turned earth and late flowers.

You rehearsed in front of a mirror. You practiced what you were going to say.

I walked.

The garden was - I stopped thinking, for a moment, because the garden demanded it.

It was beautiful.

Not the way Merrick’s garden looked. This one looked older, wilder at the edges, with the controlled abundance of a place that had been tended for a very long time by someone who understood the difference between growing things and simply arranging them. Stone paths wound between beds that were full even now, in the lateness of the season - dark foliage and late blooms and plants I had no names for, their leaves silver-edged in the moonlight.

I moved through it slowly.

The anger and the embarrassment settled slightly. I touched a leaf here. Bent to smell something there. Found a climbing rose that had gone past its peak but still held two or three red blooms near the top, stubborn and entirely unbothered about the season.

He didn’t even care to know my whereabouts in the castle, I thought.

Before - when I was his prisoner, technically, when he had locked the windows and posted guards and carried me over his shoulder through a forest - he had tracked my every movement with the intensity of someone who could not afford to look away.

Tonight he didn’t care. He simply didn’t care anymore. Whatever he had felt, whatever had produced seven days in a chair and a book placed under a pillow.., it had run out.

I crouched beside a low bed of something with wide flat leaves and bright clusters of small flowers, reaching in to straighten a stem that had fallen sideways against its neighbour.

The sting arrived without warning.

It was not like a bee.

A bee was a point of pain - sharp and then spreading. This was something else entirely. This was fire. Burning fire radiating from my right hand up my wrist and into my forearm in the time it took to draw breath, and the cry that came out of me at that moment was fierce and hot.

I fell back onto the path, cradling my hand against my chest.

The pain intensified.

No. Not again. Why do these things always happen to me.

Oh God! I screamed out again.

The fire was building rapidly. Each pulse worse than the one before, a burning that went deeper than the skin, that felt like the hand itself was being compressed from inside. My vision swam slightly at the edges. My breath was coming short and fast and I couldn’t slow it because the pain made slow breathing difficult task.

I looked at my hand.

Two small puncture marks on the heel of my palm. Already the skin around them was darkening - a deep red bloom spreading outward with visible speed, the flesh beginning to swell.

Not a sting, I thought dimly. That’s not a sting.

"What happened?"

He was there.