Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Chapter 98

Angel’s POV

The next day, we left at noon.

The sun was high and bright and the road out of Merrick’s territory was wide and smooth. Merrick rode on my left, his men in formation around us, and I rode - actually rode, for the first time without feeling like the horse was making all the decisions - with something close to competence.

The riding lessons had helped.

"You look comfortable," Merrick said, watching me from the corner of his eye.

"Don’t jinx it," I said.

He smiled.

We rode.

The first day was easy - the landscape familiar from my arrival weeks ago, the road open, the pace comfortable. I watched the countryside change as we moved out of Merrick’s lands and into the neutral territory between the two domains - subtler here, less tended, more wild at the edges, the trees growing closer to the road.

I talked to Merrick and watched the treeline and thought about what I was going to say and didn’t practice it out loud this time because he would hear me.

The first night we stopped at a wayhouse - a stone building at a crossroads that appeared to exist for the purpose of housing people making the journey between the two territories. The owner recognized Merrick. We had rooms and hot food and I was asleep before the candle burned down.

I woke before dawn and lay there and listened to the sounds of the road beginning to stir outside my window.

What am I doing?

The honest answer was: going toward something I wasn’t certain about because staying away from it had not, in two weeks of trying, produced any peace of mind whatsoever.

I got up.

I got dressed.

I knocked on Merrick’s door fifteen minutes before we were supposed to leave and found him already packed and faintly amused at my impatience.

"You’re eager," he said.

"I’m ready," I said.

"Of course."

We rode before the sun was fully up.

The second day the landscape changed completely.

Gone were the cultivations of Merrick’s territory. The trees were larger here. The light came through the canopy in shafts rather than broadly, striping the road in alternating gold and shadow.

Black Wolf territory.

I had crossed into it without announcement but I felt it anyway - something in the air, some quality of atmosphere that was different. Heavier, maybe. More present. Like the territory itself had a weight that Merrick’s didn’t.

"You feel it," Merrick said. He wasn’t asking.

"What is it?"

"The Alpha’s presence, in the land itself. The longer a wolf has held a territory - the more of themselves they’ve put into it - the more the land carries it." He looked at the trees. "Terrell has held this land for a very long time."

I looked around me.

A thousand years of one person, pressed into the soil and the stone and the air.

I thought about the empty chair at the breakfast table on the morning we’d departed.

I thought about seven days in a chair beside my bed.

We kept riding.

We arrived at the second nightfall.

Not at the castle - we stopped at a village at the territory’s interior, a larger wayhouse with a proper stable and proper rooms, and I sat at dinner with Merrick’s generals and ate warm food and felt - for the first time - the nearness of it.

I was going to face Terrell again.

Tomorrow.

I went to bed.

I stared at the ceiling.

I ran through what I was going to say.

None of it sounded right.

All of it was true.

I pressed my hands over my face and breathed and thought: just say whatever comes out. Whatever is real. Just say that.

I fell asleep somewhere after midnight.

The castle appeared in the morning.

We came around a bend in the road and there it was - I had forgotten, somehow, the particular way it sat on the landscape. Not perched, not positioned. Planted. Like it had grown there rather than been built. The Black Wolf pennants moved in the morning wind, dark against the pale sky.

My stomach did something really weird.

"Alright?" Merrick said beside me.

"Yes," I said.

The gates opened.

The throne room was already populated when we entered - guards at the walls, two of the generals near the far door, the general sense of a room that was in the middle of its regular business.

I walked in beside Merrick and felt the room adjust - the slight ripple of attention that moved through it when someone new entered.

Footsteps from the upper corridor.

Terrell came down the stairs.

He was looking at Merrick - the natural direction of someone expecting his brother and only his brother, the purposeful stride of a man coming to receive a guest he had anticipated. He looked good. Well-rested in a good way, carrying himself with the unconscious authority that I had noticed the very first time I saw him and that still, against all my better judgment, did something flattering to my breathing.

Then his gaze moved.

And found me.

He stopped.

Not slowed, but stopped. One step from the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the stone banister, his eyes on my face with an expression that moved through surprise and something else - something that was raw and quickly controlled - before the face closed down entirely.

Three seconds.

I counted them.

Then he looked away from me to Merrick and descended the last step and crossed to his brother and clasped his arm in greeting.

"Brother," he said. His voice - even and warm.

"Terrell." Merrick responded. "I hope the journey back here was..."

"Walk with me." Terrell turned. "I want to hear about the reason you’re here before anything else."

And he walked out.

With Merrick.

Through the side door, out of the throne room, without another glance in my direction.

I stood in the middle of the throne room. Alone. With all the words I had practiced arranged in my throat, ready, waiting - every version of the conversation I had rehearsed in front of a mirror, everything I had decided to say on the road - and nowhere to put any of it because he had simply...

Walked away.

I turned. Found a chair near the far wall, the kind that existed in throne rooms for the people who were waiting for things. I walked to it and sat down with my back straight and my hands folded in my lap.

I came all this way, I thought.

And he walked past me.

I told myself that the tightness in my chest was the result of three days of riding and had nothing to do with the way he ignored me.

I remained in the throne room chair for what felt like a very long time.

Nobody came.

I thought about getting up and finding someone to tell me where I was sleeping.

I thought about it for a while before I did it.

Not because I lacked the will. But because doing it would require walking past the door Terrell had disappeared through and I was not - I was absolutely, entirely, completely not

- going to walk past that door looking like someone who had been waiting in a chair.

I stood up, smoothed my travelling clothes, and turned toward the main corridor.

A maid appeared in the doorway.

She was slightly flushed - like she’d been running.

She bowed. "My lady. I’m so sorry... I should have been here when you arrived, I only just heard..." She was already reaching for my travelling bag, which one of Merrick’s men had deposited by the door at some point. "Forgive me for the delay."

"It’s fine," I said. Because it was, and because she looked genuinely distressed about it.

"Shall I show you up?" She had already lifted the bag, "If you’ll follow me, my lady..."

I followed her.

The maid reached the top of the corridor and paused.

Turned to me with the expression of someone asking a question she wasn’t certain about.

"My lady... should I take you to your own chambers?" A careful pause. "Or to the master’s?"

I looked at her.

"My own room," I said.

"Of course, my lady."

She led me down the corridor, then stopped at a door and opened it, and I walked in and recognized it immediately.

My room. The same room. The window that Terrell had latched shut. The chair by the fire. The table by the window.

The maid set my bag down and moved through the room - opening the curtains to let in the afternoon light, checking the fire, straightening the already straight coverlet.

"I’ll have hot water sent up for washing," she said. "And something to eat - you must be tired from the road."

"Thank you." I sat on the edge of the bed. Looked at the window. "That would be..." I stopped. "Actually, can you tell me - is Sheena here? The high priestess? I’d like to speak with her when I’m settled."

The maid stopped moving.

It was a very small stop. Her hands stilled on the coverlet for just a fraction of a second before she resumed.

"My lady," she said.

"Is she in the castle?"

The maid turned.

"The high priestess Sheena is... is dead, my lady."

Dead.

"Dead," I repeated.

"Yes, my lady."

I looked at her face. At the way she was beginning to fidget.

"How?" I said. "Was she... did he..." I stopped. Started again. "Was she killed? By the Alpha?"

Something moved through the maid’s expression.

"I’m sorry, my lady, I’m not.., we aren’t..." She pressed her lips together. "I’m not permitted to discuss the circumstances surrounding her passing. I’m so sorry."

And then she was moving, making a clean exit before further questions arrived, she gathered the empty water basin and moved toward the door.

"I’ll have that hot water sent up immediately," she said. "And food within the half hour."

The door closed behind her.