Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Chapter 129

Every part of me wanted to go to him.

I was not wearing anything.

His eyes were already on me.

I had seen Terrell’s face do many things. I had watched it hold rage and composure and hunger and grief and all the complicated things in between. I thought I had a reasonable catalogue of what he was capable of expressing.

It lasted only a moment, but it was there and I saw it and I felt it somewhere that had nothing to do with the bond and everything to do with the simple human fact of being seen at the worst possible moment by someone whose opinion of that moment mattered to you.

He probably hadn’t expected to find me like this. Naked, in another man’s room.

He looked at me.

Just once.

The shake was not very obvious. It was the minimum possible movement that could still communicate a specific instruction to a specific person who was watching closely enough to receive it. And what it conveyed was:

I understood.

Terrell moved his gaze from me to Raul with the ease of a man choosing where to look, and when he looked at Raul, he did something I had not expected.

"You look worse," Terrell said. His voice was conversational. Like the voice of a man at a social gathering, not a man who had just been thrown through a door with his hands bound. "Than the last time I saw you. I didn’t think that was possible."

Raul moved so fast I didn’t see it - just the sound of the impact, the crack of his fist against Terrell’s jaw, and I flinched so hard I nearly dropped the gown.

Then he turned it back.

A full-bodied laugh of someone who had found something genuinely funny, and the sound of it in this room - against the fire, against everything that had happened in the last hours - was the most alarming thing I had heard all day.

Why, I thought, with the frantic clarity of a person watching someone she cared about actively antagonize a man who had demonstrated he could and would hurt him. Why are you doing this. Stop doing this. Please stop doing this.

The grip so tight, his knuckles potruded. His face had gone to something beyond anger, something that had been waiting a long time and had finally found its shape.

Another punch. The sound of it made my stomach lurch.

"Everything I did to your village," Terrell said, "was owed."

Raul’s voice dropped to something that was worse than shouting. "My family..."

The sound that came from Raul then was not a word.

He’s keeping Raul’s eyes on him.

Every word, every provocation, every infuriating thing he said that produced another hit - every single one of them was Raul’s attention directed entirely at Terrell and not at the woman behind him with a dress held closed and no shoes on. He was being hit because it was better for me that he was being hit. He was saying terrible things because terrible things kept eyes and fists focused forward.

Stop it, I thought. You’re going to get yourself killed protecting me and you need to stop, except you won’t stop, because that’s who you are underneath everything, and I don’t know what to do with that.

Raul hit him with the force of someone who had stopped counting.

Terrell said nothing.

Terrell looked at him with the expression of a man receiving a mild inconvenience. "That’s all?" he said.

"Nails and wood." Terrell almost smiled. "You’ve had a hundred years to think about this and that’s what you arrived at."

He turned to the guards.