Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Chapter 130

Angel’s POV

They moved to Terrell - four of the guards, the bound hands making him manageable, though from the look on his face he was choosing to be manageable rather than being made so. He went with them toward the door.

At the threshold, he turned.

He looked at me.

One more look - just one, briefer than the first, carrying everything that couldn’t be said in a room full of Raul’s men. Something that was...

I’m here. Don’t do anything.

Then he was gone.

The room was very quiet.

Raul looked at me.

Then he made a sound that communicated he had remembered something, and he looked at the door his men had just taken Terrell through, and the interest in his expression shifted.

"Tonight was better anyway," he said, to himself more than to me. He moved toward the door. "A woman can wait. This..." He almost smiled, and the quality of it was something I was going to see when I closed my eyes. "This has been a hundred years in the making."

He walked out.

The silence lasted long enough for me to be certain I was alone.

Then I sat down on the edge of the bed - the bed I had been sitting on twenty minutes ago for entirely different terrible reasons - and I put my face in my hands and I breathed.

Think.

I knew the way out. I knew the way to the cave. I knew the route because I had mastered it while following Raul here. Getting back to the cave was possible.

But after the cave, what next?

I pressed my hands harder against my face.

The cliff was not scalable. Going up was a different problem entirely and the answer to that problem was probably not possible for a human with no equipment.

But there had to be something.

There had to be something because Raul’s people were here, which meant Raul’s people had arrived here somehow, and if they had arrived they had used a route, and if there was a route...

The sounds started from outside.

I heard it before I had finished the thought - a sound that I was not going to name directly even in my own mind. It sounded like something being done to someone who was trying not to respond to it. Someone containing something...

Terrell.

I was on my feet.

I wore my gown quickly. And with my bare feet, I was at the door before I had decided to be, and then I stopped.

Think.

He had told me to stay put. He had told me with the shake of his head and the look in his eyes that staying put was the strategy. That being unknown was the advantage I had and using it was the right thing.

But the sounds...

I pressed my hand to the door.

He’s here because of me, I thought. He went over a cliff because I went over a cliff. He’s on a cross because he kept Raul’s attention on himself. He is receiving every one of those sounds because he made a choice about which of us Raul would focus on.

I was not going to stand in this room and listen to that.

I opened the door a crack.

I looked.

The clearing was lit by torches. Everyone was gathered - Raul’s people, the men and women of this hidden place, arranged in the loose way of witnesses. And at the center...

My breath left me.

He was on the cross.

The cross had been constructed with the speed of people who had clearly thought about this particular thing before. It was solid, braced, driven into the ground with the permanence of something meant to stay. And Terrell was on it. His hands on either side, the nails - I looked away from the nails. His feet. The blood that was both old and new.

His head was up.

That was the thing that broke something in me - his head was up. Not hanging, not dropped, not the posture of someone who had surrendered to the weight of what was being done to them. His head was level and his jaw was set and his eyes were looking at something in the middle distance with the looks of a man who had decided that the people doing this to him were not going to have the satisfaction of his collapse.

I was crying.

I hadn’t noticed when I started. The tears were simply there, moving down my face.

Someone turned.

Then someone else.

Then all of them, gradually, the wave of it - the attention of the clearing shifting toward the doorway, toward the crack of the open door, toward me standing there with bare feet and a held-closed gown and tears I hadn’t had the presence of mind to hide.

Raul turned last.

He looked at me.

"Why are you dressed?" His gaze moved over me - the gown, the tears, and then upward, the examination of someone looking for something. "And why are you crying?"

I shook my head quickly. "I’m not... I’ve never seen..." I looked at the cross, which was not difficult to look at with distress because distress was entirely appropriate right now. "I’m human. Sights like this..." I pressed my hand to my chest. "I’ve never seen anything like this."

"You don’t know him," Raul said.

Not a question.

I shook my head.

He held my gaze for the particular length of time that told me he was deciding how much to believe.

I held his gaze back and let him look because looking away would have been worse.

Then he turned back to the cross.

"You," he said, to Terrell above him. "You still haven’t said what brought you to the bottom of this cliff."

Terrell looked down at him.

The smile came back - the infuriating, deliberate, perfectly deployed smile of a man who had decided that the most powerful thing available to him in this moment was the absolute refusal to give anything away.

"I missed you dearly, Raul," Terrell said.

Raul looked up at him.

Something moved through his expression - the fury, still there, and underneath it something that was almost, almost the unwilling recognition of a man who had waited a hundred years for this and was discovering that the reality of it was not landing the way he had imagined.

Because Terrell, bleeding and nailed and entirely without options, was smiling at him.

And no one knew what to do with that.