Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Angel’s POV

Everyone was assembled in the courtyard by the time we came down - the troupe of soldiers in their formation, horses ready, the trader looking significantly the worse for a night on the dungeon floor, Merrick standing to one side in his riding clothes looking like a man who had made peace with his morning.

Terrell was addressing the soldiers.

I stood a few feet back and watched him - the way the soldiers listened, the quality of their attention, the authority he carried. He spoke without raising his voice and the courtyard was completely silent.

"You do not come back," he said, "without the child. Is that understood."

It was not phrased as a question.

"You will keep the trader in sight at every moment. You protect the woman with your lives. Every lead, every family, every transaction - you follow all of it until it ends at the right door." He looked along the line. "Is that understood."

"Yes, Alpha."

He stepped back.

Merrick came forward and closed the distance between us in a few strides, and before I had fully registered the movement he had his arms around me - a brief, solid embrace that smelled of his riding coat and the morning air - and his mouth was near my ear.

"I’ll be back," he said. "Don’t miss me too much. I know it’ll be difficult."

I laughed despite myself. It came out more genuinely than I’d intended.

He pulled back and looked at my face with the warmth of someone who was always slightly more comfortable with the world than the world deserved, and then he was moving away, swinging up onto his horse with the ease of a man who had done it ten thousand times.

Agnes came to me.

We looked at each other.

There was too much to say, so we said nothing, and she squeezed my hand once - hard - and let go and turned to her horse, and Merrick reached down from his saddle and offered her a hand up, and she looked at it for a moment and then took it with a hard rock expression.

The troupe moved out.

I stood in the courtyard and watched the gates until they were gone.

The courtyard was very quiet.

I became aware, slowly, that the person standing beside me was Terrell.

I did not look at him immediately. I looked at the gate.

"I suppose," he said, "it’s just you and me."

I looked at the gate for one more moment.

Then I nodded.

The silence that followed was intense and already closing in from all sides.

"Is there anything you’d like to do?" he asked.

Agnes’s voice arrived, clear as a bell: don’t forget. Don’t betray them. Don’t let a handsome face...

I should go back to my room. I should find a book and a corner of the garden and a safe distance and spend the day at that distance, where nothing complicated could happen and no promises would be tested.

That was what I should do.

"Do you have something in mind?" I said instead.

He looked at me. Something moved through his expression - not surprise, but something adjacent to it, something that had been waiting to see which way this would fall.

"Come on," he said.

He walked, and I followed. I followed him through the gate at the east end and down the path toward the river - the same river where my fate to two brothers has been revealed and we’d been married. Agnes’s voice was still in my head saying don’t forget, don’t forget, don’t forget...

And then I saw the boat.

It was small, sitting on the bank in the morning light. A basket in the center with a cloth over it, the cloth weighed down against the breeze. The river moving past it in the unhurried way of rivers, which had their own timeline.

The warmth moved through me before I could stop it.

He planned this. Not this morning, not in the last hour - planned it, arranged it, had someone bring a boat and a basket to the river in the early morning hours of a day he couldn’t have been certain would unfold this way.

He had thought about it.

He had thought about me.

Don’t forget, Agnes said, in my head.

I’m not forgetting, I answered her, silently. I’m just - I’m looking at a boat.

He turned and offered me his hand.

I looked at his hand.

I thought about all of it - everything I had decided, everything I was still deciding, the clean ledger I had arrived with and the cracks that had developed in it and the fact that the cracks kept growing no matter how carefully I maintained the wall.

I took his hand.

His grip was steady. He simply held my hand and walked me down the bank and steadied the boat while I stepped in, his other hand light at my elbow as I settled onto the seat.

I arranged my skirt.

I looked at the basket.

"You considered food," I said.

"I considered that skipping breakfast would be a poor beginning," he said, settling opposite me, taking the oars with ease.

"I was going to ask about breakfast," I admitted. "Earlier, when you asked me to follow you. But I didn’t want to seem..."

"Hungry?"

"Focused on food."

The corner of his mouth moved.

"You can be focused on food," he said. "I won’t hold it against you. Infact, I love watching you eat."

I tried not to blush as I kept a straight face.

The boat moved out from the bank, the current catching it gently, the morning spreading itself over the water in long gold panels.

I sat across from Terrell - my husband, my family’s murderer, the man who had saved my life countless times, the man who had planned a boat and a basket and had offered me his hand and whose face I had been refusing to look at directly for days - and the river carried us, and the castle grew smaller behind us, and ahead there was only water and the early morning brightness.

I opened the basket.

There was bread, still warm. Cheese, fruit, two cups and a bottle of something that was either wine or juice and turned out, when I poured it, to be both - some mixture, sweet and slightly tart, that I had not had before and turned out to be exactly right for a morning on a river.

I handed him a cup.

He took it.

We sat on the water in the morning light and I thought about Agnes riding away with Merrick and the soldiers and the trader, and I thought about her voice in my ear before dawn.

I thought about all of it.

And then I took a piece of bread from the basket and ate it, because the morning was beautiful and the water was calm and I was, despite everything, despite Agnes haunting words, actually hungry.