Chapter 122
Merrick’s POV
I woke up bright and energized.
I lay still for a moment and looked up at the ceiling. The inn smelled of old wood and last night’s fire and the smell of bread from somewhere below.
I stretched.
A full length stretch - my arms above my head, back arching, every part of my body lodging its honest report on yesterday’s hard riding and a night on an unfamiliar mattress. The mattress had been acceptable. It wasn’t bad for an inn.
Today would be different.
I had decided this before I was fully awake. Yesterday had ended badly - not failed, not over, but badly. Today we would find the right one. I would make sure of it. The trader had more names. The road had more stops. The math was simple and I intended to hold onto the simplicity of it.
I needed to be done with this and head back to Black Wolf.
The situation I had left behind. Angel, in a castle that was large and quiet, with her sister gone, navigating whatever was going to happen between her and my brother now that the buffer of other people had been removed.
Terrell was many things. He was not, historically, gifted at being a buffer for himself.
I hoped he was trying.
I stretched again, this time with reckless abandon. I wasn’t wearing any clothes, and that was what I loved about this place. In this inn, my room was my privacy. But back at Black wolf, it was impossible to sleep naked, courtesy of my brother who could storm in at any moment.
I lay in the warmth of the bed and thought about the day ahead. About how much ground we need to cover...
Just then the door opened.
My head came off the pillow.
Agnes stood in the doorway.
She had clearly been awake for some time - dressed, composed, with the look of someone who had somewhere important to be. She looked at me with the direct, undeflected gaze she used for everything, and her eyes went over my naked body, to the abandoned sheets by the side, and she did not react.
Not a flicker. Not a sharp intake. Not the little shocking sounds that every other person that has found me naked exhibited.
She looked me in the eye.
"Time to get up," she said. "Come downstairs and be useful."
Then she left.
The door closed.
I lay in the resulting silence and looked at the ceiling.
I looked at the door.
I looked at the ceiling again.
What.
The thought arrived in the wordless register that thoughts used when they were too fundamental for language. What was that. I sat up.
I looked at the door one more time, as though it might offer clarification.
It did not.
I stood up and reached for my clothes and turned the experience over in my mind repeatedly. I had a damn sexy body that produced responses. This was not a thing I had ever needed to think about because it had always simply been true. Women responded. They fell head over heels. It was not something I engineered or particularly cultivated, it was simply a condition I had lived with all my life.
Agnes had looked at me like I was a piece of furniture she needed to move past.
Not distaste. Not indifference. Not the look of someone trying to suppress a reaction. Just... nothing. Direct, unamused, total nothing, the way you looked at a doorframe or a table.
I pulled on my shirt.
Was this woman human? I had asked myself this before. I was asking it again now for different reasons.
I pulled on my boots.
No woman in my race had ever - not once, not in my recollection, not even the ones who actively disliked me - shown lack of interest in my nudity.
I stood up and looked at the door.
Fine, I thought.
I went downstairs.
The innkeeper had prepared breakfast with the enthusiastic gratitude of a woman who had been given her child back and intended to express her feelings about this through food. The table overflowing with food - bread that was still steaming, a dish of preserved fruit, eggs prepared two different ways as though she had been uncertain which I would prefer and had decided to cover both possibilities.
I sat down.
Who am I to reject food?
I was reaching for the bread when I registered Agnes, already seated opposite me, working through a plate filled with hot food.
I looked at her.
She continued eating.
I reached for the bread.
She looked up.
We were looking at each other across the table, and I was aware of doing it - the looking. She was different in the morning. Not softer. Not more accessible. Just - present in a particular way, with the morning light coming through the window doing what morning light did, and the evidence of last night’s crying faint and almost imperceptible unless you were looking for it, and Agnes looking back at me with the complete absence of any awareness that this staring game was supposed to have a result in her favor.
She did not look away.
I did not look away.
The bread sat between us.
The eggs sat between us.
The preserved fruit sat between us.
Something warm arrived in my face - a mild and entirely unwelcome heat in the jaw and cheekbones - and I picked up the bread and directed my attention at it.
The absolute fuck...
I ate the bread.
Agnes, across from me, resumed her own breakfast with the serenity of someone who had just won something without particularly trying.
I did not look up again.
Fine, I thought, for the second time this morning. Absolutely fine.
****
Alpha Terrell’s POV
The boat had been the right idea.
I thought about this in the early hours of the morning while the castle was still dark and the fire in my room had burned down. I sat in the chair by the window and I thought about it.
She had taken my hand. She had eaten bread and drunk from the cup and she had looked at the water with a beautiful expression. She had talked. Not about the things that sat between us, not about any of the heavy things, but she had talked - about the river, about the food, about something Merrick had said once that she found funny and I had listened with the complete attention I had apparently reserved entirely for her without consulting myself about it.
It had been, by most measurements, a good morning.
I was trying to replicate it.
This was the problem.
I stood up and walked to the window and stood there and thought. I was not a man who had ever given significant thought to romance. I had given thought to strategy, to territory, to the mechanics of power and it’s maintenance. Romance had been an irrelevance, the kind of thing that other people managed and that I observed afar.
And now I was standing at a window before dawn trying to think of something that would make Angel smile, and the honest truth was that I had no mechanism for this.
Kane would not understand. Kane would produce wine and a woman, and that was not the instrument required.
I opened the door.
"Get Kade," I said to the guard outside.
The guard went.
Kade arrived looking flushed and satisfied - like he just got off the arms of a woman.
I looked at him.
"Do you ever stop?" I said.
He looked at me with the genuine bewilderment of someone receiving a question that doesn’t have a coherent answer. "Alpha." He said it the way you said a word when you needed a moment to think. "Are you seriously asking me that."
"I am."
"You." He pointed at me. "You are asking me if I ever stop."
"I appear to be."
"Alpha." He crossed his arms. "I was there. I was present for the years before the Luna arrived. I have a comprehensive personal history of your..."
"That’s enough."
"...I watched you go through women the way some men go through..."
"Kade."
He stopped. With the expression of a man who had more to say and was containing it with effort.
"That life," I said, after a moment, "is..." I looked at the window. "I thought it was something. I thought it was the way things were. You get what you want, you move on, there’s no complication." I stopped. "And then you find someone who makes all of it look like..." I searched for the word. "Like noise. Like you were filling a room with noise because you didn’t know what the actual sound was supposed to be."
Kade looked at me.
"Terrell," he said. Quietly, for once.
"It’s nothing," I said. "I’m not... it’s nothing. The point is you’re free right now and some of us are trying to be something different." I looked at him. "That’s all."
He was quiet for a moment.
Then: "Did you do anything with that woman. The one my brother brought for you sometime ago? After you returned from Merrick’s estate." A pause. "Does Angel know?"
I said nothing.
"Because if she doesn’t..."
"Kade."
"I’m just..."
"I didn’t call you here for this," I said. I had been about to ask him for help, for ideas. But I looked at him now and thought: no. Not this. Not with Kade. He would be well-intentioned and completely wrong.
"Actually," I said, "never mind. You can go."
He stared at me. "You called me here at..." He gestured at the window, at the darkness outside it. "You called me here before dawn and all you want to tell me is never mind?"
"I’ll call you later."
"Terrell..."
"Leave, Kade."
He left with a sober expression.
I stood alone in the room, wondering who else was capable of helping me.
Then I opened the door again.
"Find Gareth," I said to the guard.
The guard went.