Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Chapter 132

Angel’s POV

An hour has passed since I came back into this room, and it was getting quieter by the minute.

I sat on the edge of the bed, and I listened to the quiet and tried to make something useful out of it.

Outside: distant voices. The sounds of Raul’s people moving through their clearing, the torch-lit business of a community whose evening had been reorganized by the arrival of a significant prisoner. The sounds of...

I pressed my hands flat on my knees and breathed through my nose.

I was not going out there. Terrell had told me with the shake of his head and I was going to honor it because it was the right strategy, and because going out there and doing something that revealed what I was to Raul was not something I could undo once done.

Think, I told myself. Think about something useful.

I thought about the cave route. The ledge, the entrance, the darkness of the interior and the length of it - the walk through, the opening into the forest, the route to the clearing. It was the only geography I had. Whether it was useful geography was another question, I just needed to have it seared into my memory.

I thought about...

The door opened.

I was on my side with my eyes closed before the footstep had fully landed. I lay very still, closing my eyes tightly and pretending to sleep.

The footsteps kept coming closer.

Then a hand landed on my shoulder.

I regulated my breathing with everything I had.

"I hadn’t forgotten you." His voice was the low, even register of something that was not really loud and therefore somehow louder. "I just had something more pressing." The hand moved - and I held completely still inside and outside. "But that’s done now."

Please, I thought. The same prayer. Please. Not this. Please.

"I still plan on breeding you. Putting my heir inside you..."

The sound that came next was not a sound I was prepared for.

It was brief and quick, cutting Raul mid-breath. Mid-sentence.

The hand left my shoulder.

Another hand - different, larger - came over my mouth before I could make the sound that was building in my chest, and I opened my eyes and the face above me was battered and bloodied and more welcome than anything I had seen since I had gone over the cliff this morning.

Terrell.

He looked terrible. He looked extraordinary. He looked like someone who had been nailed to a cross an hour ago and had walked away from it, which was exactly what he was, and his eyes when they found mine had that quality again — the one I was still trying to find words for, the one that arrived whenever he looked at me since the moment on the floor when I had seen his face.

He put his finger to his lips.

I nodded against his hand.

He moved it.

"We have to go," he said. The whisper was barely air. "Now. We don’t have much time. He’ll regain consciousness soon."

I sat up and looked at Raul - on the floor, utterly still. My stomach flipped.

"How," I whispered, "did you get down from that cross?"

He looked at me with the expression of a man who has just been asked something he finds mildly insulting.

"Something that small," he said, "doesn’t hold me."

I looked at his hands - the evidence of the nails still there, the wounds that were already beginning to close. I looked at his face - the cuts, the bruising, the general evidence of an evening that had been terribly horrifying.

"Terrell..."

"We don’t have time," he said. He was already moving - toward the door, looking through the crack like he was reading the landscape. "Which way did he bring you?"

"Wait." I reached out and caught his arm.

He turned.

I looked at him. I looked at Raul on the floor. I looked at the door and the clearing beyond it and the people moving through it and I thought about the cave and the fog and the cliff and the complete absence of any obvious way out.

"Take him," I said.

Terrell looked at me.

"Raul," I said. "Take him with us."

A pause.

"He’s our passage out," I said. "His people won’t touch us if we have him. They won’t risk it." I held his eyes. "And once we’re clear, we have leverage."

Something moved through Terrell’s expression, like he as assessing the plan.

"That," he said, "is a very good idea."

He reached down and picked Raul up with the ease of someone for whom the weight of a full-grown man was not a meaningful variable, throwing him over one shoulder as I helped him bound the unconscious man’s hands with a strip of material torn from somewhere in about four seconds. Then he turned and offered me his other hand.

I took it.

He squeezed it once, and then we moved.

Getting out of the room was the easy part.

The clearing was the harder part - the torches, the people, the hundred-odd problems of being a battered Alpha carrying an unconscious lord through the community of said lord’s followers. But Terrell kept moving.

The people who saw us stopped. Completely. And then they saw what was on his shoulder and they stopped in a different way - the arrested stillness of people looking at their leader’s unconscious body.

No one moved to stop us.

"Where’s the direction?" Terrell asked quietly.

"Straight ahead," I said. "Through the trees. There’s a path."

I found it - the same path Raul had walked without looking back, which I had committed to memory because I had understood even then that I would need it. The trees, the density of them, the cold that deepened as we went under the canopy.

"This leads to a cave," I said. "The cave leads to a ledge on the cliff face."

"And up?" he said.

"I don’t know," I said. "I couldn’t find a way up. But the cave is better than..."

"Better than back there," he agreed. "We keep moving."

I looked at his hands. At his face. At the weight he was carrying on one shoulder and the ease with which he was carrying it, which was a physical impossibility by any standard I had previously understood and which was apparently simply easy for Terrell of Black Wolf.

"Are you alright?" I asked.

He glanced down at me as we walked.

"I’ve had worse evenings," he said.

"You were nailed to a cross."

"I’ve been nailed to worse things." He looked ahead. "Keep moving."

I looked at him for another moment and I kept moving.

The cave entrance appeared in the dark ahead of us, the dark inside it deep and cold.

Terrell looked at it.

"Lead the way," he said.

I went first into the dark, with his hand finding mine in it, and we went together into whatever came next.