Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Chapter 113

Angel’s POV

I stopped pacing and stood in the middle of the room and looked at the window, where the sky had gone from black to the deep grey-blue of approaching dawn, the first sign of light pressing against the dark from somewhere beneath the horizon.

Nearly dawn.

Agnes had been gone a long time.

I sat back down. Stood back up. Sat down.

She’s fine. But what if she’d found a way out? What if she was already beyond the gates, already on the road, already...

No. She wouldn’t leave without me. I knew that. Agnes had spent the entire evening announcing her intention to protect me. She would not leave me behind.

Unless she couldn’t come back. Unless something had happened, unless she was lost somewhere, unless she had run into the wrong hands, unless...

I was already at the door before I had consciously decided to move.

I needed to see Merrick. He will help me find my sister. For some reason, Merrick was the safest choice right now. Not Terrell.

Merrick will understand better.

His room was empty.

The bed had clearly been slept in - the covers pushed back, the indentation still present - but the room was empty and cool.

I stood in the middle of it and turned around once, as though he might appear from a corner I had missed.

He didn’t.

I turned to leave.

"Did you sleep in here last night?"

I spun.

Terrell was in the doorway.

He stood there - in his familiar posture - leaning against the frame, with the expression of someone who has asked a question and is prepared to wait for the answer. His eyes moved over the room, over me, with the assessment that seemed to be simply the way he occupied space.

"No," I said.

He looked at me, like he was trying to decide if I was telling the truth.

"What are you doing in here then?" he said.

"Looking for Merrick." I kept my voice even. "He isn’t here."

Terrell pushed off the doorframe and came in, one slow look around the room taking in the pushed-back covers and everything, then stepped back out into the corridor.

"He’s around somewhere," he said.

He started walking.

I followed him.

I wasn’t entirely sure why. There was probably a sensible argument for going back to my room and waiting, or for asking a guard, or for any number of things that did not involve walking the corridors of Black Wolf at dawn beside the man who was my husband and who I had not yet managed to look at directly for a while now.

But my mind was occupied - entirely, uselessly occupied - with Agnes, with the empty hours, with the grey light growing at the windows, and my feet were simply going where the most likely solution to the problem was going.

Terrell glanced back at me at some point.

"You care that much about finding Merrick?" he said. Not pointed. Curious, maybe. Or something that resembled it.

I nodded.

He looked at me a moment longer.

Then he turned back to the corridor ahead and kept walking, and I kept pace beside him, and neither of us said anything, and somehow that was fine. Not easy, but fine.

We went down the stairs.

And that was when we heard it.

A banging.

A determined sound of someone communicating urgency through a surface.

I stopped.

Terrell stopped, and kept a focused expression.

Then;

"Kitchen," Terrell said, already moving.

I was right behind him.

The kitchen was dim and empty, the banging louder now, clearly coming from behind the storeroom door at the far end. Terrell crossed the kitchen in a few strides, grabbed the handle, and pulled.

The door swung open.

I looked inside.

I stared.

Merrick was sitting on the storeroom floor with his back against a sack of something, his hair dishevelled and his robe - which had clearly started the evening as a fine garment - now hosting a substantial quantity of white flour across one shoulder and down the left side. He had a piece of cured meat in one hand and the expression of a man who had made peace with his circumstances out of pure necessity.

Agnes was standing three feet away from him, her arms crossed, her own hair and the front of her shirt dramatically dusted in flour.

They were both looking at the door.

They were both looking at Terrell.

They were both very, very white.

The silence lasted approximately three seconds.

Then I made a sound that started as a gasp and ended as something I could not have stopped if I had tried - a laugh. A full, loud laugh beyond my control.

Agnes turned the full force of her gaze on me. "Don’t."

"I’m not..." I was absolutely. "Agnes, what..."

"The door locked," she said, with dignity. "From the outside. It was an accident."

"And the flour?"

A pause.

"That," said Merrick, from the floor, in the voice of a man choosing his words carefully, "was a separate incident."

"He started it," Agnes said.

"I did not start..."

"You knocked it off the shelf..."

"I was reaching past you..."

"I told you to reach the other way..."

"There was nothing on the other way..."

"There was bread on the other way, I saw the bread..."

"That wasn’t bread, that was a..."

"It was bread," Agnes said, with the finality of someone closing a courtroom.

Merrick looked at her.

Then he looked at Terrell.

"I came down for food," Merrick said, to his brother. Very clearly. "That is all I came down for. I want that understood."

Terrell said nothing.

"Food," Merrick repeated.

Terrell reached down and offered his brother a hand.

Merrick took it. He stood, brushing flour from his robe with the attention of someone trying to recover something that was probably unrecoverable. A small cloud of white rose from the fabric and drifted peacefully in the morning light coming through the kitchen window.

I looked at my sister - flour in her hair, arms still crossed, chin still up.

"Don’t you dare," she said.

"I’m not," I said, and covered my mouth with both hands.

Agnes looked at the ceiling.

"I want breakfast, Angel. Please."