Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Agnes POV

Merrick was a good rider.

Better than good - he rode the way people rode when they had learned young and ridden often and had never needed to think about it, the body and the horse operating as a single thing. It was impressive - unlike other werewolves who couldn’t ride because they depended on their wolf form for everything, including traveling.

I let him beat me.

Three times - pulling back just enough, checking the mare just before she would have shown what she had, acting like a woman who was terrible at riding. I watched Merrick from my peripheral vision for any sign that he was doing the same thing, performing for me the way I was performing for him.

He wasn’t.

He rode straight, no games.

"The west boundary," I said, when we had been riding a few minutes. "I’ve never seen that side of the territory. What’s out there?"

He glanced at me.

"Forest mostly," he said. "Opens onto common land about two miles out."

"And beyond that?"

"Depends which direction."

"North."

"River first. Then the road to the merchant settlements."

"How wide is the river?"

A pause. Brief... the kind that could have been casual.

"Wide enough," he said. "There are crossing points. Three, I think."

Three crossing points. I stored this with everything else.

"What about the southern path?" I asked. "Down past the paddock. Where does that go?"

"Guard post first. Then the lower grounds. Then you hit the pack boundary."

"How many guards at the post?"

He looked at me then. Fully. With the clear-eyed attention of a man who had been listening to my questions and had done the arithmetic.

I held his gaze without expression.

"Two, usually," he said. "Sometimes four, when the rotation changes."

I nodded like a woman filing away interesting information about a place she was simply curious about, and turned the mare toward the fence line.

Rotation. I would need to know when the rotation changed.

We rode on.

The afternoon was moving toward its later part by the time he said they should head back, and I turned the mare around without argument. I had what I needed. The western boundary, the river crossings, the guard post, the rotation.

I had accomplished more on this ride than I had planned to.

I looked at the back of Merrick’s head as we rode and thought: you are not your brother. This was not absolution. This was not softening. It was simply... fact. He was not Terrell, and he had answered my questions without flinching, and he had let me pick my own horse.

They didn’t change the plan.

They were simply - noted.

Angel looked up when I came back, from where she was sitting with her book.

"How was the ride?"

"Good," I said.

She studied my face the way she always had - as if looking for something’s suspicious.

"Who went with you?"

"Merrick."

A pause. Something moved through Angel’s expression.

"Are you eating up here tonight?" she asked. "I can have dinner sent..."

"No." I sat down and pulled off my riding boots. "I’ll eat downstairs."

Silence.

I looked at my sister.

"Terrell will be there," she said. Carefully.

"I know."

"Agnes ..."

"Angel." I set both boots down and looked at her evenly. "I know."

She looked at me like she was trying to read something that kept shifting.

Then she smiled.

Small. The smile of a woman who didn’t quite trust good things yet.

"Alright," she said. "Let’s get ready."

Dinner began in the specific silence of four people who had things to say and were waiting to see who would say them first.

The food was good. I noted this without sentiment. The table was long and the candles were lit and outside the tall windows Black Wolf’s evening was settling in, the last of the light leaving, the dark coming slowly up from the tree line.

I ate.

I listened to the silence.

I looked at Terrell once - just once, a direct look, long enough to be clear - and he looked back with the stillness of a man who had learned to withstand being looked at.

I looked at my plate.

I thought about his face on that hill, the horse, the sword, the sound of everything I had known burning.

I thought about my son.

Five months old when they took him from my arms. Fivemonths of existing, five months of being, with his father’s mouth and his grandfather’s eyes and the particular smell of him that had been the most specific thing I had ever loved.

I picked up my wine.

Set it down.

"You want me to accept you," I said.

The table went quiet in a different way.

I looked at Terrell.

"As her husband," I said. "As my brother-in-law. You’d want that, I imagine. Her family’s blessing. The appearance of something normal." I kept my voice even - not warm, not furious, just even. "Even after everything. You’d still want that."

Terrell looked at me for a moment.

Then he nodded. Once.

I looked at him. At the face I had memorized from the hill. At the man who had taken everything and then had the extraordinary audacity to keep taking until he had taken my sister too.

"I might be willing," I said.

The silence changed texture. I felt Angel go still beside me. Felt Merrick’s attention sharpen without any outward change.

"On one condition though," I said.

No one spoke.

"Find my son."

The words landed on the table like a bomb. I looked at Terrell.

I had his full attention. I had had it since I started speaking - but now there was something different in it. The look of a man who understood that what had just been asked of him was not a small thing.

"He was five months old," I said. My voice stayed even. I had practiced this. I had said it to myself in the dark until it stopped making me shake, until I could carry it in my mouth without drowning in it. "When the slave traders took him. He’d have been sold. Infant, healthy - someone would have paid for that. He’s out there." I held Terrell’s gaze. "Find him. Bring him back to me."

The room held its breath.

"Do that," I said quietly, "and I’ll give you whatever blessing you need from me."

I picked up my wine.

Took a sip.

****

Alpha Terrell’s POV

The study was quiet.

I had come here after dinner to think.

I sat behind the desk.

I thought.

The candle burned down approximately half an inch before Merrick arrived, which told me he had gone somewhere else first - his room, probably, or the kitchen - and had only come here after deciding he couldn’t avoid it.

He came in without knocking, stood in the middle of the room and then, began pacing.

I watched him pace.

He went from the bookshelf to the window. From the window back to the bookshelf. He had his hands behind his back, with a stern expression.

I let him go back and forth three times.

"Well?" I said.

"I’m thinking."

"I can see that. You’ve been thinking since you walked in. What I’m asking is whether the thinking is going to produce anything or whether I’m watching it for my own entertainment."

He stopped at the window and looked out at the dark.

"She’s not what I expected," he said.

"What did you expect?"

"Someone easier to read." He turned from the window. "She lets you see exactly what she wants you to see. The anger, the defiance - all of that is real, I’m not saying it isn’t. But she’s got it arranged. Like a wall she’s built up."

I looked at him.

"And what’s behind it?"

"I don’t know yet." He resumed pacing - shorter passes now, the kind that meant he was getting closer to something. "That’s what I’m working out."

"You’re working it out by pacing my study."

"I’m working it out by thinking, which some of us do out loud and in motion, yes." He shot me a look. "Not all of us can brood motionlessly into the middle distance and call it strategy."

"I call it thinking."

"It looks like brooding."

"Merrick."

He stopped.

Looked at me.

"What," he said.

"What are you actually doing?" I asked. "With her. Specifically. Because I sat at that dinner table tonight and watched that woman put a condition on the table that I did not see coming, and I am now sitting in my study wondering what exactly you’ve been doing in the time between the storeroom and the dinner table, because something moved and I need to know if it was you or if it was her doing it entirely on her own."

Merrick was quiet for a moment.

Then he sat down - finally, in the chair across the desk - and stretched his legs out and looked at the ceiling with a puzzling expression.

"I rode with her this afternoon," he said.

"I know. And?"

"And she asked me about the river crossings." A pause. "And the guard post. And the rotation schedule."

I was still.

"She asked you about the rotation schedule."

"In the way a woman asks about a rotation schedule when she’s curious about the territory," Merrick said. "Which is to say, in the way a woman asks about a rotation schedule when she is absolutely mapping an escape route and has decided I’m useful for acquiring information."

I stood up.

"She’s planning..."

"Sit down, Terrell."

"If she takes Angel..."

"Sit down. I’m handling it." He waited until I had sat, which I did, but not happily. "She let me beat her on the ride. Three times. She’s a better rider than she showed me - I could see it, the way she checked the horse just before it would have opened up. She was testing the mare. The one she’d already picked for escape, I suspect."

I looked at him.

"You suspect."

"The mare she chose was the one she’d been looking at before I arrived. She had already made selections - one for herself, one for Angel. Then she saw mine and adjusted." He paused. "She also spent a significant amount of time looking at your horse."

The fire crackled.

"Did she."