Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Chapter 104

Angel’s POV

After breakfast, neither of them left.

That was the first signal.

Merrick didn’t even move his body, and Terrell didn’t stand and excuse himself to the business of the morning the way he had been doing. They both... simply stayed. At the table, with their cups, as if waiting for a third person to finish so that something can begin.

I set down my cup.

Looked at them.

"What is it?" I said.

They exchanged a glance.

"My study," Terrell said, and stood.

I looked at Merrick.

Merrick’s expression was the careful one.

"Come," he said, and the gentleness of it told me everything about the weight of what was coming.

I entered Terrell’s study for the first time that morning. It was decorated with dark shelves, cabinets, a large oak desk, and a low burning fire.

Two chairs had been positioned facing the desk.

Terrell went behind it.

Merrick sat in one chair.

I sat in the other.

I folded my hands in my lap and looked at Terrell and waited.

He looked at me.

He looked, briefly, at my bandaged hand.

Then he looked at me again with the eyes that I had once thought belonged to a different man - silver and direct and carrying a certain look of authority.

"I need to tell you something," he said. "And I need you to hear all of it before you respond. Can you do that?"

I looked at him.

"Yes," I said.

He held my gaze.

And began.

***

I heard every word.

I sat in the chair with my hands folded in my lap and I listened to all of it the way I had promised - the argument for why human vulnerability in a supernatural world was a liability that could not be managed indefinitely by doctors and guards.

Terrell laid it out with the focused attention of someone who had been building the case for days.

Then he said it.

"We want to convert you," he said. "Make you one of us."

The room was quiet.

I looked at him.

Then at Merrick.

Then back at Terrell.

"Is that..." I stopped. Started again. "Is that actually possible? A human becoming..."

"Yes," Terrell said.

"It’s been done," Merrick added, carefully. "Not often, and not without risk, but..."

"No," I said.

Terrell’s jaw moved. "Angel..."

"No." I unfolded my hands and placed them flat on my knees and looked at him. "Absolutely not."

"Your life is in danger..."

"Then my life is in danger." I stood. "People’s lives are in danger all the time. Human lives. My life, specifically, has been in danger since before I met either of you and I managed."

"You nearly died," Merrick said quietly. "Multiple times. In the space of..."

"I know." The word came out sharper than I intended. I took a deep breath. "I know what happened. I was there for all of them." I looked at my bandaged hand and then deliberately away from it. "That doesn’t change my answer."

"Angel." Terrell’s voice was different now - not the argument voice, not the authority voice. Something calmer. "Think about what you’re..."

"I am thinking." I turned toward the door and then turned back, because I had more to say and walking out before saying it would be the wrong kind of exit. "You want to change what I am. Fundamentally. Not what I wear or where I live or who I’m married to - you want to change what I am at the most basic level, and you’re presenting it as protection, and maybe it is, but it’s also..." I pressed my hand against my chest. "I am a human woman. That is what God made me. That is what I have been my entire life and it has been... it has been difficult, yes, it has been frightening and painful and I have nearly died and I will probably nearly die again because that is apparently what my life has decided to be..." My voice was fraying at the edges now and I could hear it. "But it is mine. My life. My body. My..."

"We’re not trying to take it from you," Merrick said.

"Then don’t." I looked at him. "Don’t do this. Don’t sit in this room and plan what I should be."

I walked out.

The door was not slammed - I was too tired for slamming, too hollowed by the weight of the last several minutes. I simply walked out and pulled it closed behind me and stood in the corridor for a moment with my back against the wall and my eyes on the ceiling.

I walked down the corridor, made my way up the stairs and Into my room.

I sat on the bed and pressed my unbandaged hand over my mouth and breathed.

They want to turn me into a werewolf.

I said it to myself plainly.

They wanted to take the thing I was and replace it with something else. Something stronger, something harder to kill, something that could survive in their world without a doctor.

They thought they were protecting me.

I knew they thought that.

I also knew what it felt like to have your nature treated as a liability. What it felt like to have someone look at what you were - big, fat and ugly - and suggest that the solution was to be something else.

I had spent my whole life being told that.

I pressed my hand harder against my mouth.

You are a walking disaster, Terrell had called me. Not to my face, but I knew what he thought. I had seen it in his face. The cost of it. The terror of watching something fragile exist in proximity to things that were not.

He thought I was fragile.

He thought human was fragile.

Maybe it is, said the honest part of me.

I don’t care, said the rest.

Merrick’s POV

The door closed.

Terrell and I sat in the study and looked at each other across the desk.

I shook my head.

"I told you," I said.

He said nothing.

"I told you she would..."

"I heard you, Merrick." He stood. Moved to the window. Stood there with his hands at his sides and his back to me, which was the posture he used when he was thinking very hard and wanted no one watching his face while he did it.

"We’ll find another way," I said. "More guards, better security, we track down whoever is behind the attempts and we remove the..."

"It won’t be enough."

"Terrell..."

"It won’t." He turned. And the look on his face was not the Alpha-making-a-strategic-decision look. It was something rawer than that. Something that I had seen on his face perhaps three times in a very long life. "Someone is systematically trying to reach her and we have failed to stop it every single time. We have been... we have been lucky, Merrick. Lucky that I was in the garden. Lucky that I got to her in time. Lucky that the paralysis didn’t reach her heart. Lucky that I constantly watched over her during our journey here." His jaw was tight. "I am not going to depend on luck indefinitely."

"So we find another way..."

"There is no other way that works." He came back to the desk and put both hands flat on it and looked at me directly. "This is the only way that makes her safe. Permanently. Completely. The only way she wakes up one morning and doesn’t have to have someone following her into gardens because she’s not..." He stopped.

I looked at him.

He quickly dropped his eyes to the desk.

And I sat back in my chair and I looked at my brother - at the set of his shoulders and the thing in his face that he was working hard to frame as strategy and was not, not entirely, not even mostly - and I felt something settle into place with the quiet click of something that had been obvious for a while and had been waiting for the right moment to be said.

"Terrell," I said.

He looked up.

"Is that the only reason?" I said. "For protection?"

His expression remained careful.

"What other reason would I have?"

I held the look.

He held it back.

"What other reason," he said again. Flatter this time. Warning at the edges.

I thought about the seven days he’d stayed at my castle to nurse her back to health himself. About the way he had looked at her across the breakfast table this morning when he thought no one was looking - one unguarded second, with the cup in his hand forgotten.

"I don’t know," I said simply. "You tell me."

He held the look for three more seconds.

Then he walked out.

The door closed behind him with the quietness of a man who had decided that leaving was preferable to answering.

I sat in the empty study.

I reached across to the cabinet - it was close enough from the sofa, barely - and poured something significant into a glass and sat back with it and looked at the fire.

What other reason.

I drank.

This had moved, I understood now, into territory that was between the two of them alone. Not a pack matter, not a joint decision, not something that Merrick’s presence or position of reasonable middle ground could navigate for them.

Whatever Terrell was not saying, and whatever Angel was running from - they would have to find each other in it, or not.