Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Angel’s POV

The slave trader was crying. And not quietly.

Agnes had both fists in his jacket.

She was not shouting. That was the thing that made it worse to watch - she was very quiet, her face very close to his, her voice low and relentless.

"Think," she said. "You took him from my arms. You handed him to someone. There was a transaction. Think about the transaction."

"I... there were so many, I swear to you, I swear on everything I..."

"He had a birthmark," Agnes said. "On his left shoulder. The shape of a..."

"I don’t... I don’t look at them that closely, I don’t..."

"Think."

She shook him again. His teeth clicked together audibly.

I stood very still behind her.

I should stop her, some part of me noted, from a very calm and distant place. I should step forward and put a hand on her arm and say Agnes, enough, this isn’t helping.

But I did not move.

Because he was her son. Her five-month-old son who had been in her arms and then had not been, and every single day since then Agnes had been carrying that absence and saying nothing about it to anyone because there had been no one to say it to. And this man, this small trembling man on the floor of Terrell’s throne room, had been the instrument of that.

I remained rooted to a spot.

"Enough."

Terrell’s voice came from the throne. Agnes’s hands stilled on the jacket. Not because she was frightened, I knew - but because she had heard something in the word that told her it was not a command but a statement of fact.

Enough. The man doesn’t know. More of this will not make him know.

Agnes held on for two more seconds.

Then she released the jacket and stood, smoothing her hands on her sides.

The trader slumped.

"He can’t remember," Terrell said. He wasn’t addressing it as a failure. But the truth. "Which means the memory needs a prompt." He leaned forward slightly, elbows on the arms of the throne, looking at the trader. "He will go with you. Every family he sold an infant to, you will see for yourself. You’ll know your child."

Agnes looked at him.

"I’m sending soldiers," Terrell continued. "A full troupe. You won’t travel without protection." He paused. "And Merrick will go with you personally."

"I heard my name."

Everyone in the throne room turned.

Merrick was in the doorway.

He had clearly just woken up - his hair had the evidence of a pillow, his robe was a bit rumpled, and he was literally yawning as he came through the door, one hand raised to cover it, with the expression of a man who had followed the sound of his name out of pure reflex before his brain had fully committed to being awake.

He looked around the throne room.

At the trader on the floor. At Agnes standing over him. At me. At Terrell on the throne in full Alpha regalia before dawn.

"...Yes?" he said.

Terrell cleared his throat.

"You’ll accompany Agnes," he said, with an authoritative tone. "On the search for her son. I can’t go with her since I have duties here to attend to. So you will go in my stead. As her personal protector. You leave tomorrow."

Merrick’s expression went through several stages.

"I see," he said.

"Good."

"I do actually have some things at my estate that require..."

"I’ll handle it."

"There’s the matter of the estate accounts, which specifically need my..."

"Merrick."

A pause.

"I’ll handle it," Terrell said again. Quieter. Which was somehow louder.

Merrick looked at his brother. Then at Agnes, who had turned to look at him with the assessing attention of a woman conducting a rapid evaluation. Something passed between them that I couldn’t entirely read.

Merrick looked back at Terrell.

"Right," he said. In the tone of a man closing a door on an argument he’d decided wasn’t worth having. "Alright then."

Terrell nodded once. Then looked at the guard to his left. "Lock the trader up. Don’t let him out of your sight. Don’t let him out of the building." He looked at the trader. "If he’s gone when I come back, whoever was watching him will die under my sword."

The trader, from the floor, nodded with total commitment.

***

Agnes didn’t speak much for the rest of the day.

We went back to the room and she sat on the bed and looked at the window for a long time, and I sat nearby and let her. I knew this kind of silence - I had my own version of it, the silence that came after something had moved through you too large to process quickly. You had to let it settle before you could find the edges of it.

I read. Or I held the book and looked at the words and let her have the quiet.

Tomorrow she would be gone.

The thought arrived and sat with me in an uncomfortable way. Agnes had been here for less than two days and already the idea of the room without her felt empty - the kind of emptiness that I hadn’t anticipated feeling so soon or so acutely.

But there was also - underneath that, quieter than that - something else.

Tomorrow it would be just Terrell.

I did not examine this feeling directly. I looked at it sideways, the way you looked at something bright. I noted it existed. I put it down.

***

Agnes was up before dawn.

I woke to the sound of her moving, and I lay still and watched through half-closed eyes as she washed, dressed, moved through the room with the determination of a woman who had decided today was a day that required her full self.

When she was done, she came to the bed.

She sat on the edge and looked at me for a moment. Her face in the early grey light was the face I had grown up beside, and I felt the complicated ache of it, the love and the grief so intertwined by now that I couldn’t have separated them if I’d tried.

She leaned down and put her arms around me.

I held on.

"Angel." Her voice was low. The voice she used when it was only us. "Listen to me."

"I’m listening."

Her arms tightened slightly. Her mouth was close to my ear. "Whatever you do," she said, "don’t forget. Don’t let him make you forget. His face, his..." A breath. "He’s handsome and he’s capable and he will make you feel like you’re the only thing in the room. I’ve watched him." Another breath. "But he burned our village. He killed our family. He is the reason for all of it, Angel. Every piece of it. The reason we are all alone in this world."

I closed my eyes.

"Don’t betray them," she said. "Don’t betray Papa and Mama and everything they were. Don’t let a handsome face and a muscular body trick you into forgetting what he actually is."

"Agnes..."

"Promise me."

The room was very quiet.

"I won’t let my emotions stand in the way," I said. "I promise."

She held on a moment longer. Then she pulled back and looked at my face.

"Good," she said. And went to finish packing.