Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Chapter 112

Lord Merrick’s POV

"What are you doing in here?" I asked, when I realized she wasn’t even supposed to be here in the first place.

"Looking for food," she replied. Quickly.

"In the storeroom."

"That’s generally where food is kept, yes."

I looked at her. "In the middle of the night."

"Food is useful at all hours." She turned towards the shelf. "Your point?"

"My point," I said, "is that it’s..." I stopped. Recalibrated. "What I’m asking is why you’re in here specifically, at this specific hour, rather than sleeping?"

"What are you doing in here?" she said, without turning around.

I opened my mouth.

Closed it.

"This is my house," I said.

She turned then, and the look on her face was the look of someone who has just found a small but satisfying inconsistency and intends to use it.

"Is it?" she said pleasantly.

"Yes."

"Funny." She tilted her head. "Didn’t you just tell me - not ten minutes ago, in this very room - that you were the otherbrother? The second one?" A pause. "As I understand it, this castle belongs to the first brother."

I stared at her.

"Don’t avoid the question," I said. "Answer what you were doing in here."

"I just did answer. I’m hungry." She repeated. "I didn’t eat dinner."

I didn’t have to ask why. The timeline assembled itself without any help - arriving as cargo, being dragged in here against her will, spending time catching up with her sister. Of course she hadn’t eaten dinner. It’s either she’d refused to come down for dinner out of pride, or she’d simply been too caught up to remember.

I nodded.

"There’s food in the kitchen," I said. "Come on." I turned toward the door and pushed.

The door did not move.

I pushed again, with more strength.

The door didn’t budge. I looked at the handle. Tried it. Pushed again.

Behind me: "What’s happening?"

"It’s..." I tried the handle again. "It appears to have..."

Agnes appeared at my shoulder and grabbed the handle with both hands and pulled. Then pushed. Then rattled it with the energy of someone who had decided force of will could substitute for mechanics.

"Why isn’t it... what’s wrong with it... why won’t it..."

"It must’ve caught when I came in," I said. The latch, probably - the old storeroom latch that I’d heard Kane mention to my brother several times, but it hadn’t been taken seriously. "Locked from the outside."

Agnes stared at the door.

Then she hit it.

With her fist, once. Then again.

"Hello?" Her voice went up a really high volume. "Hello... someone open this door..."

"It’s the middle of the night," I said. "Everyone is..."

"HELP..."

"Agnes..."

"SOMEONE OPEN THIS..."

"Agnes." I put enough force in it that she stopped, though the look she turned on me made clear she was stopping on her own terms and not mine. "It’s the middle of the night. The castle is asleep. You’re going to wake everyone up, frighten the guards into a full alert, and we will spend the next twenty minutes explaining why the Alpha’s mate’s sister and his brother were locked in the storeroom at three in the morning."

She looked at me.

I looked at her.

I could bring down that door. As easily as bringing down a small tool box. But for some reason, I choose not to.

Besides, It wouldn’t be bad being trapped in here with the subject of my mission. This could be a starting point for me.

I looked at the floor - bare stone, cold, deeply uninviting - and accepted the situation with grace. I sat down.

The stone was exactly as cold as it looked.

I stretched my legs out and looked at the shelves around us - the sacks of grain, the jars of preserved things, the cured meats hanging from the hooks overhead, the large sacks of flour stacked against the far wall - and I thought about the bath I had enjoyed that afternoon, and about the sequence of decisions that had carried me from that bath to this floor, and I decided that Terrell owed me something huge.

"You were here to find food," I said, to the shelf across from me. "The food is here. Look around. See if there’s something edible that doesn’t require cooking."

She was still looking at me with a death-stare.

"Please," I added.

The death-stare held for another few seconds.

Then Agnes turned and began walking the shelves.

I sat on the floor of the storeroom in the middle of the night in my robe and reflected on my life choices.

***

Angel’s POV

I sat on the edge of the bed and watched the curtain and told myself she was fine.

She was Agnes. Agnes was always fine. Agnes had walked out of a burning village carrying an infant and survived slave traders and ended up in a castle full of werewolves and had, within hours of arriving, managed to curse the Alpha of Black Wolf to his face and live to discuss it.

She was fine.

I told myself this approximately every four minutes for two hours.

It didn’t help.

She had woken me up.

The room had been dark and quiet, and I had been asleep for maybe three hours when something had dragged me back to the surface - the small sounds of movement, the whisper of bare feet on stone.

I had pushed myself up and looked through the dark to where Agnes was standing near the window, fully awake, dressed in the clothes I had found for her.

"Agnes," I said. "What are you doing."

A pause.

"Nothing," she said, which from Agnes meant something.

I had looked at her.

She had looked at the door.

And I had understood exactly what she was doing.

"Agnes."

"Go back to sleep."

"If you’re going to..."

"Go back to sleep, Angel. I’m just going to look around. Get a sense of the layout." She said it with the confidence of someone describing a mild evening activity. "I’ll be right back."

I had wanted to say: don’t. I had wanted to say: there’s nowhere to go, I’ve checked, and even if there were, someone is trying to kill me and Black Wolf is currently the safest place I have and I’m not - I don’t want to leave, Agnes, which is the part I can’t explain to you yet.

I had said none of this.

Partly because Agnes with a plan was a natural force and I had learned early in life that the most effective thing to do with natural forces was wait them out. And partly because - if I was being truthful with myself, which I was trying to be more consistently - some small and shameful part of me had thought: let her look. She’ll see that there’s nothing, and then maybe she’ll stop, and I won’t have to explain yet all the reasons I’m not trying anymore.

So I had lain back down.

And she had gone.

And I had told myself she’d be back in twenty minutes.

That had been hours ago.