Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Chapter 101

Angel’s POV

I looked up and Terrell was already crouching beside me, close, his eyes going immediately to my hand. I knew it was him because he still had his dinner clothes on. He must have been in the garden already before I came in.

"I don’t..." My voice was thin. The pain was getting worse. "Something in the flowers. I was just... I tried to straighten a stem and something..."

He took my hand.

Carefully. Both of his wrapped around mine, and the contact sent a fresh wave of fire up my arm and I made an involuntary sound and felt his grip steady rather than withdraw.

He turned my hand toward the moonlight and looked at the marks.

His expression changed.

"Can you feel your fingers?"

I flexed them. Slowly, with effort. "Yes. They’re... it burns."

"Do you feel any numbness in your arm?"

"No. Just... burning. It keeps..." Another pulse of it. My breath caught. "It keeps getting worse."

He was already standing, already pulling me upright with one hand, supporting my weight with an arm around my back before I’d fully left the ground.

"It’s a scorpion," he said.

"What?"

"Black scorpion. They nest in that bed in autumn - the groundskeeper was supposed to have cleared them." His jaw was set. "Can you walk?"

"Yes..."

"Tell me immediately if the burning moves past your elbow."

"Why?"

"Because that means the venom is moving faster than it should be. Tell me."

I nodded as I walked. He kept his arm around me, and I was in enough pain that I didn’t have the energy to negotiate the contact - I simply let it be there, solid and warm, as I put one foot in front of the other.

"I can’t..." Another pulse. The pain crested and I stopped walking, pressing my free hand against my mouth, waiting for it to pass.

It passed, marginally.

"I have it," Terrell said, and then he had lifted me, and we were moving faster than I could have managed on my own.

"I can walk..."

"You’re going pale."

"That’s just my complexion."

"Angel."

Something in the way he said it made me stop arguing.

I held my hand against my chest and felt the burning pulse through it and let him carry me across the garden and through the door and up the stairs, and I concentrated on the instruction he had given me: tell me if it moves past your elbow.

I monitored my arm.

The burning stayed in my hand and wrist.

By the time we reached my room I was shaking slightly - not from cold, from the sustained effort of managing the pain - and Terrell laid me on the bed and was already at the door calling for a maid with a voice that moved through the castle walls like thunder.

He came back.

Sat on the edge of the bed.

Took my hand again - both of his around mine, the same careful grip - and turned it to examine the marks in the lamplight.

His face was very close.

I looked at him.

At the jaw that was set and the eyes that were moving carefully over my hand with an intense focus and the deep line between his brows that appeared when he was concerned and trying not to show it.

He looked up.

Found me looking at him.

Neither of us said anything.

The pain pulsed through my hand.

His grip tightened - just fractionally, just enough - and he didn’t look away.

"I need you to stay still," he said. "And stop reaching into flower beds at night."

"I was straightening..."

"You were meddling with things in the dark that you couldn’t see properly."

"The stem was..."

"Still," he said. Not unkindly.

I went still.

The maid arrived.

Terrell began giving instructions like someone who had dealt with this before, and I lay back against the pillow and looked at the ceiling and breathed through the burning and thought:

He came.

Whatever I had told myself in the garden about his new attitude and signs of indifference towards me...

He came.

And he was still here.

And his hands were still around mine.

And he had not once, not for a single moment broken eye contact.

***

Alpha Terrell’s POV

The doctor arrived fourteen minutes after I sent for him.

I knew it was fourteen because I had been counting, and I had spent those fourteen minutes sitting on the edge of Angel’s bed with her hand in mine, monitoring the spread of the inflammation against the marks I had made mentally at the wrist, at the base of the thumb, checking every two minutes.

It had not moved past the wrist.

That was good.

She had stopped trying to argue about being still, which was either also good or meant the pain had become consuming enough to override her instinct to manage her own situation. Based on the line between her brows and the careful way she was breathing - in through the nose, slow, out the same - I suspected the latter.

The door burst open.

Merrick came through it with the energy of someone who had heard something alarming from a distance and had been moving since before they fully understood what they’d heard.

He took in the room - Angel on the bed, my hand around hers - and his face became filled with panic.

"What happened?"

"Scorpion sting. In the garden."

"The garden..." He crossed to the other side of the bed, crouching, his eyes going to Angel’s face and then to her hand. "How long ago?"

"Twenty minutes. The venom’s contained below the wrist."

He looked at her. "Are you in pain?"

"Extraordinary amounts," she muttered.

Relief and concern moved through Merrick’s face in equal measure. He put his hand on her shoulder. "The doctor is coming. You’re going to be alright."

"I know," she said.

She did know. I could hear it in her voice - not bravado, just the steadiness of a woman who had been through worse and was aware of the fact.

The doctor arrived.

He examined the marks, the spread, her pulse, the colour of the inflammation. Asked her questions. She gave him answers as honestly as she could manage.

He produced what he needed from his bag and began working.

I stood.

"Merrick," I said.

He looked up from where he’d positioned himself by Angel’s shoulder.

I gestured at the door.

He looked at Angel. At the doctor. Back at me.

"She’s in good hands," I said.

He held the look for another moment.

Then he followed me out.

We went straight to my study.

Merrick came through the door already talking. "Why are we..."

"Close it."

He closed it.

"Why are we leaving her with the doctor when we should be..."

"Because what I need to say to you isn’t for anyone else to hear." I crossed to the cabinet. Opened it. Took out two glasses and the bottle I kept for the occasions when something needed to be said that required something in the hand while saying it.

Merrick saw the bottle and went quiet.

He knew me well enough to know what the bottle meant.

He came and took the glass I poured for him and we both sat and I drank half of mine in one pull and set the glass down on the desk and looked at my brother.

He waited.

"How long are you staying?" I said.

"Until my business here is wrapped up. Why?"

"You’ll stay longer."

His eyes narrowed. "What’s happened?"

I looked at the desk.

"She has been poisoned," I said. "Twice. Once by Sheena’s herbs and once tonight by a scorpion in a garden bed that should have been cleared. And before either of those, someone put a snake in her tent, and tried to murder her in a river." I looked at him. "Those are separate occasions. In the space of more than a month. In which Angel has come within proximity of dying."

Merrick’s expression had gone very still.

"I know," he said quietly.

"Do you?" I sat back. "Because I’ve been sitting in that room for the last twenty minutes thinking about it and I keep arriving at the same place." I picked up the glass and turned it in my hand. "She’s human."

"Yes."

"She heals like a human. She’s affected by things that would barely touch us. She can’t sense threats the way we can, can’t outrun them, can’t fight them off with anything except the intelligence she has which is considerable but is not... it isn’t enough, Merrick. It isn’t enough against what’s out there." I set the glass down. "Someone is trying to kill her. We don’t know who. We don’t know why. And she wanders into gardens at night and reaches into flower beds because she doesn’t know what’s in them, because she’s human, and she doesn’t have the instincts we have and she never will..."

"Terrell. I’m going to employ the best doctors," Merrick said, in the tone of a man who has been thinking about solutions and is offering the one he has. "When we return to my castle I’ll have medical staff resident in the..."

"It won’t be enough," I said.

"Then guards. More guards. A permanent detail assigned specifically to..."

"It won’t be enough."

He stopped.

He looked at me.

And I could see him, across the desk, beginning to understand where this was going. The way his expression shifted - not arriving at the destination yet, but seeing the road that led there.

"What are you saying?" he said, carefully.

I met his eyes.

"We need to turn her," I said. "Convert her. Make her one of us."

The study was very quiet.