Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Chapter 131

Gareth POV

Black Wolf’s gates had never opened faster.

I had ridden through them at speed before - drills, emergencies, the various categories of urgency that came with serving the Alpha of a major territory - but I had never ridden through them with this kind of speed, the kind that came from the calculation that every minute we spent not moving was a minute the Alpha and his Luna were spending at the bottom of a cliff.

The guards at the gate had read our faces before we were close enough to speak. By the time we pulled up, the inner yard was already getting filled up.

Kane was there within minutes.

Looking like a panicked beta who had been forged over decades of service to an Alpha who generated more crises per year than most territories saw in a generation. He stood in the center of the yard and listened to everything I said without interrupting once, and when I finished he said:

"How many do you need?"

"Fifty," Bellick said, before I had finished drawing breath.

Kane looked at him.

"Fifty," Bellick confirmed. "At minimum. We don’t know what’s down there."

"We know it’s not nothing," Kade added. "The horse was not an accident. Someone arranged that cliff."

Kane held Bellick’s gaze for a moment. Then;

"Give me twenty minutes," he said.

Then turned and hurried out.

In moments he had organized Soldiers, horses, and the equipments we need.

I stood in the center of it and watched and felt the helpless urgency of someone who had done the correct thing and was now at the mercy of time.

"He was alive when he went over," Kade said, at my shoulder. Quietly. Not for the yard - for me.

"He was," I said.

"He’s still alive."

I looked at him.

"He is," Kade said, with the conviction of someone who needed to say it out loud to believe it. "The Alpha does not die at the bottom of a cliff. That is not how this ends."

I said nothing.

But I nodded.

Eighteen minutes later, everything was set.

The horses were ready. The soldiers were ready. The generals were already back in the saddle.

We were about to move when Kade held up his hand.

"Wait," he said.

Everyone looked at him.

"We’re missing something," he said.

"We have fifty soldiers, weapons, horses, and a direction," Bellick said. "What are we missing?"

Kade looked at him with the expression of a man who has just identified the gap in the plan and is not enjoying being the one to name it.

"We can go down," he said. "I understand going down. Ropes, cliff face, manageable." He looked at us both. "How do we come up?"

Silence.

The slightly airless silence of a group of people who have been moving too fast to ask the obvious question and have just had the obvious question asked.

I looked at Bellick.

Bellick looked at me.

"We..." I started.

"The ropes," Bellick said slowly. "If we go down on ropes..."

"We go down on ropes tied to trees at the top," Kade said. "Yes. And then what? We find them, we get them, and then we stand at the bottom of a cliff holding two people and look up."

Another silence.

"We come up on the same ropes," I said.

"While carrying the Luna who cannot climb a rope unaided and an Alpha who may or may not be in a condition to climb without assistance," Kade said. "Yes. I’m aware that’s the answer. I’m raising it now so we can solve it before we’re at the bottom of the cliff raising it."

Bellick had already turned his horse toward the supply building. "More rope," he called back. "And harnesses. And the winch equipment from the training yard."

"We don’t have time..."

"We take ten more minutes now or we stand at the bottom of a cliff for an hour later," Bellick said, not looking back. "I choose ten minutes."

He was right.

We took the ten minutes.

We went back at speed - fifty soldiers and three generals, moving with the urgent speed. The road to the cliff was the same road it had been an hour ago and was somehow longer in the direction of urgency.

When we reached it...

I had left a man at the top to mark the spot - someone I had found at the market. He was there, standing at a careful distance from the edge like he was scared of it.

"Anything?" I asked.

He shook his head. "Nothing from below. No sound."

I looked at the fog.

"The trees," Bellick said, already moving. He had identified the anchors before I had - three large specimens close enough to the edge to be useful, well-rooted enough to hold the weight we were going to put on them. The soldiers moved to them with the rope and went down to work.

The knots were Bellick’s work. He checked each one himself, three times, with careful attention.

The extra rope was tied on - length added to length, the ropes extended down into the fog with the particular uncertainty of things going somewhere you couldn’t see.

"How far?" one of the soldiers asked.

"We don’t know," I said.

"Alright."

Bellick, Kade, and I went first.

It was not up for discussion - it was simply understood, the way things were understood between soldiers of different ranks. We went to the edge, took our ropes, and went over.

The fog came up around us immediately.

The cliff face was beside me - stone and moss and the long wet cold of somewhere that didn’t see sun - and I went down hand over hand.

Below me was nothing visible.

Above me was the rope going up into fog that had swallowed the top.

And beside me were Kade and Bellick, their ropes parallel to mine, their descent as steady as mine was trying to be.

He’s alive, I thought. Because Kade had said it, and because the alternative was not a thought I was going to have until I had evidence that required it.