Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Chapter 102

Alpha Terrell’s POV

Merrick sat with my statement for a long moment. Long enough that I could hear the fire in the corridor through the closed door, long enough to hear the distant sound of movement from the direction of Angel’s room.

"You’re serious," he said.

"When have I said something like this and not been serious?"

"It’s..." He leaned forward, elbows on knees, looking at the floor. "Terrell, conversion isn’t - it doesn’t always work. For humans. The success rate..."

"I know the rate."

"If it doesn’t take..."

"I know what happens if it doesn’t take." I held his gaze. "I know every risk. I’ve known them since tonight, since I was carrying her across that garden and counting the seconds between her pulses and thinking..." I stopped. Breathed. "Thinking that this keeps happening. And every time it happens we are one piece of bad luck away from a result that can’t be fixed."

Merrick looked at me.

"And if she says no?" he said. Quietly. "Because you know we have to ask her. We can’t do this without..."

"I know that."

"She’s going to say no, Terrell. You know she will. She’s going to hear we want to change what you fundamentally are and she’s going to..."

"I know," I said. "I know what she’ll say. And I’m going to ask her anyway, because the alternative is watching something find her on a night when we’re not close enough to..." I stopped again. Looked at the window. "I was in the garden tonight because I followed her. Because I watched her walk out of the dining room and I told myself she was fine and then I followed her anyway, and when she cried out I was close enough to get there in time." I looked back at Merrick. "What about the night I’m not close enough? What about the night she wanders somewhere and I’m three days away at Black Wolf and you’re not watching and whoever has been trying to reach her finally..."

I stopped speaking.

Merrick was very still.

We sat in the quiet of the study and I looked at the glass on the desk and felt the truth of the evening settling into my bones - the fourteen minutes of counting, the spread of inflammation I had watched with more focused terror than I had felt in a very long time, the sound of her crying out in the dark.

"She’s going to fight it," Merrick said finally. "The idea of it."

"Yes."

"You’re going to have to convince her."

"I know."

"How?" He looked at me. "How are you going to convince her? She’s already..." He gestured vaguely, a gesture that encompassed everything. The history between us. The distance at dinner. The way I’d been keeping to myself since her arrival.

I picked up the glass.

Finished it.

Set it down.

"I’ll figure it out," I said.

Merrick looked at me for a long time. Then he reached across and picked up the bottle and poured more into my glass without being asked.

"She came back here herself," he said, quietly. "You know that. No one made her."

I looked at the refilled glass.

"I know," I said.

"That means something."

"I know that too."

He sat back.

"She called you Merrick, right?" he asked. "When she woke up. After the seven days."

"Yes."

"And you left."

"Yes."

He was quiet for a moment. "Why?"

"Because she needed to come back herself," I said. "Or not at all."

Merrick said nothing.

"And she came back," I said.

"She came back," he agreed.

I picked up the glass.

"Go back to her," I said. "She’ll want someone when the doctor is done."

"And you?"

"Don’t worry about me." I said.

Merrick stood. Straightened, and moved toward the door.

***

Angel’s POV

I didn’t see Terrell after that night.

Not at breakfast - Merrick brought it up himself, appearing at my door with a tray. Not at midday, when the maid came to help me to the bath and back. Not in the corridors, though I listened for footsteps with more attention than I was comfortable admitting.

The hand had improved - the inflammation down from its worst, the burning reduced to something manageable, a dull ache that reminded me of its presence whenever I forgot about it, which was not often.

Merrick checked on me three times.

Once in the morning, when he brought the tray and sat with me while I ate and he talked about his day.

Once in the afternoon, when he came with books from the library - a selection, he said, chosen by describing my apparent tastes to the librarian and letting her make recommendations.

Once in the evening, brief, to make sure the medication had been taken and the hand was progressing.

"He asked about you," Merrick said, during the afternoon visit. Casual. Not looking at me.

"The doctor?"

"Terrell."

I looked at the book in my lap. "What did he ask?"

"How the hand was. Whether you’d eaten." A pause. "Whether you’d slept."

I turned a page I hadn’t read. "What did you tell him?"

"The truth." He glanced at me sidelong. "That you were doing well. That you’d eaten everything on the tray, which I found encouraging. That you seemed like yourself."

I nodded.

"He didn’t come up himself," I said.

"No."

I turned another unread page.

"Is he avoiding me?" I asked, and I aimed for the tone of someone asking a practical question and landed somewhere slightly more honest than that.

Merrick was quiet for a moment.

"I think," he said carefully, "that he’s giving you space."

"He gave me a great deal of space yesterday."

"Yes." Another careful pause. "He’s not - Terrell doesn’t always know what to do with something he can’t resolve through action." He turned a book over in his hands. "When there’s something to do - a problem to fix, a danger to address, a person to carry across a garden - he’s completely capable. It’s the in-between that’s difficult for him."

I thought about how he’d cared for me for seven days at Merrick’s castle.

About the book he’d left under my pillow.

About the short time between my cry in the garden and the doctor arriving during which he had sat on the edge of my bed with my hand in both of his and not moved once.

Action, I thought. He’s good at action.

"I’m not a problem to be resolved," I said.

"No," Merrick agreed. "You’re not. That’s rather the difficulty."

He left at the evening visit with the promise of dinner brought up again and the instruction that I was not to attempt the stairs alone, which I accepted with more grace than I might have managed twenty-four hours earlier because my hand still ached and the stairs were the last thing on my mind.

The castle settled into its night-time quiet soon enough.

I ate dinner at the window - the grounds below dark and still, the garden invisible from this angle, which I was choosing not to think about as a metaphor. The food was good, but the silence was a bit uncomfortable.

I washed my face with my good hands. Changed into my sleeping clothes, and prepared for bed.

Then I laid down.

I reached over and put out the lamp.

The room went dark - not completely, the moonlight coming through the gap in the curtains in a thin silver strip that lay across the floor and reached the foot of the bed and stopped there. Enough to see shapes. Enough to know where the walls were.

I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling and listened to the castle.

He asked how you’d slept.

I closed my eyes.

He followed you into the garden.

I turned onto my side.

Even though he acted like he didn’t care about your movements in the castle, he followed you.

That notion had been sitting with me all day in the way that things sit with you when you’re trying not to pick them up. The difference between the Terrell who had carried me over his shoulder through the forest and the Terrell who had ignored me since my arrival.

Distance, I had decided. Indifference. He was definitely...

A sound.

I stopped breathing.

A sound from the corridor outside my door, like muffled footsteps.

I lay still.

Listened.

It didn’t repeat.

I stared at the strip of moonlight on the floor and thought about all the times someone had tried to kill me, and something cold moved through me that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room.

Who wants me dead? I thought. Who wants me dead so badly that they can’t even wait for my wounds to heal.

The silence continued.

I let out a slow breath.

Stop it, I told myself. It’s a castle. Castles make sounds.

I closed my eyes again.

And the door opened.

Not with violence - not thrown, not forced. Quietly. The careful opening of a door by someone who did not want to wake the person inside.

My heart stopped.

Then:

"It’s me."

Two words. Low. Very familiar.

Terrell.