Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Chapter 108

Angel’s POV

"My husband woke me up before dawn," Agnes started her story. Quietly. Not the voice she used for strength. "He was... he was already up when I woke, already dressed, and he looked at me when I opened my eyes and the way he looked at me, Angel..." She pressed her hands flat against her thighs. "I didn’t understand it then. I was half asleep and annoyed and I didn’t understand it."

I said nothing. Just watched her face.

"He said he needed me to go to the neighboring village. Early, before people were up, to collect something from a woman there. And I was furious." A small, broken sound that might have been a laugh. "You know how I am. I told him he was out of his mind, that it was barely light outside, that he could go himself if it was so important..." She stopped. "He begged me."

I had not known my sister’s husband well. But I had known enough to know that he was not a man who begged.

"He told me to take the baby and go," Agnes said. "He kept saying it. Take the baby and go. And I was angry because it made no sense and the baby was sleeping and I wanted to go back to sleep, and he just - he kept saying it. Like a prayer. Take the baby and go. And then I looked at his eyes."

She stopped.

I waited.

"He was frightened," she said. "Frightened in a way I had never seen him before. And I didn’t understand it but I understood that,

I understood that something was wrong, and I said alright, I’ll go. I’ll take the baby and I’ll go." She looked at the fireplace. "I told him to tell mama and papa where I’d gone. He said he would."

The fire crackled.

"I hadn’t gone far," she continued, "when I heard the first sounds. I thought... I didn’t know what I thought. I stopped on the road and I listened, and something in me, Angel, something in my stomach just... knew. I turned back. I don’t know why. I knew I shouldn’t. I knew something was wrong and I turned back anyway because they were all there and I couldn’t just..."

She stopped.

When she continued, her voice was different. The voice of someone recounting something they have had to recite to themselves many times in order to survive having it in their memory.

"The whole village was on fire by the time I got back to the hill. You could see it from the road. All of it. The houses, the market, the... everything. Just fire." Her jaw was tight. "And there were men on horseback. Moving through with heavy swords." She paused. "I’ve forgotten a lot of what I saw. I think my mind chose to forget. But one face..." Something came into her expression that was cold and dark. "One face I will never forget. Not for a single day of the rest of my life. THEIR ALPHA" She looked at me. "He was in front. Riding in front of all of them. Like it was nothing. Like it was... a morning’s work. Using his sword on anyone who moved." Her voice had dropped to barely above a whisper. "He was smiling, Angel."

The room was very quiet.

"I ran," Agnes said. "I ran with the baby and I didn’t stop. I went the other way, away from the village, off the road. I went to the convent to look for you, but you weren’t there. No one would tell me anything. I didn’t trust them, so I kept running - through the trees for God knows how long." Her hands were shaking now, and she pressed them flat against her knees. "I thought I’d made it. I thought..." A sharp exhale. "They came out of nowhere. Three of them, slave traders. On the road beyond the woods." She looked at her hands. "They took my baby first. To sell..." Her voice broke completely.

I was crying.

I didn’t remember starting. The tears were simply there, moving down my face without ceremony, and I didn’t bother stopping them.

"They said my baby boy would fetch a good price," Agnes said. "An infant. Someone would want him." A long pause. "I screamed. I fought. But they took him anyway and they took me and they separated us and I have not... I don’t know where he is. I don’t know if he’s..."

She stopped.

She pressed her fist to her mouth.

And Agnes - bold, furious, indomitable Agnes who had been cursing an Alpha to his face without blinking twenty minutes ago - made a sound that I felt somewhere deep in my chest.

I moved from the bed.

I sat beside her and put my arms around her.

She didn’t resist. She leaned into me with the weight of someone who has been standing alone for a very long time and has finally, in this moment, allowed themselves to stop.

We held each other.

We cried together, the two of us, in the firelit room - for mama and papa, for her husband, for the baby whose face I never saw. For the village. For all the different losses that sat between us, some shared and some carried alone, and for the long, impossible distance between that morning on the hill and this moment right here.

Much later - after the tears had exhausted themselves, after we had sat in silence long enough for the silence to become something bearable - Agnes pulled back and looked at my face with the red-eyed, the eyes of a woman who has cried everything out and come out the other side into something clear and hard.

"I meant what I said," she told me. Quietly. Not with fury this time. With conviction. "I am not leaving you in this place."

I looked at my sister’s face.

I thought about Terrell and Merrick in the study that morning, asking to convert me to be one of them.

I thought about all my confusing feelings towards Terrell since I learnt he had nursed me back to life.

I pressed my lips together.

"I know," I said.

Agnes searched my eyes.

"Angel," she said carefully. "Tell me the truth. Are you alright?"

"I don’t know yet," I said.

Agnes looked at me for a long moment.

Then she reached out and took my hand, the way she had when we were small.

"Then we’ll figure it out," she said.