Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Alpha Terrell’s POV

Gareth came in some minutes later, looking alert and slightly amused.

"I need a strategy," I said. No preamble. I had already wasted enough of the morning on preamble.

Gareth looked at me.

"For what, Alpha?"

"Making a woman smile."

A pause.

"A... strategy," he said.

"Yes."

"You’re saying... you want a strategy." Something was happening at the corner of his mouth. "As in, you want to approach this the way you’d approach battles."

"Gareth." I looked at him with the look that had ended longer conversations than this one. "I’m aware of the word. I used it deliberately. I know what I’m talking about, you know what I’m talking about. Give me something useful before I lose patience."

He cleared his throat.

"Right," he said. "First..." He stopped. Looked at my face. "You’re going to need to smile more yourself, Alpha. That face won’t..."

"The strategy, Gareth."

"That is the strategy. It’s step one." He held up a hand before I could respond. "Take her into town. Let her look around, find what she wants. Women like... they like choosing things. Being given options and being allowed to pick what they like."

I considered this.

It was not entirely unreasonable.

"The threat on her life," I said. "I’m not walking her through a market without protection. We’d be exposed."

Gareth nodded slowly. "Take the generals. All three of us. And..." He was already thinking through it. "Have her wear a veil. Conceals her face, no one knows she’s the Luna..."

"Her figure," I said flatly.

Gareth stopped.

"The territory has seen her," I said. "Her... she has a particular..." I stopped. Started again. "She is not difficult to identify even without seeing her face. The veil solves only one problem, but the whole territory apparently knows how unique my wife’s figure is."

Gareth thought about this with focused concentration.

"Then we’ll need two more women," he said. "Same figure. Similar stature." He made a vague gesture that communicated the concept. "Three women in veils. No one can tell which is the Luna. You stay close. We stay close. In and out, she shops, everyone is watching." He looked at me. "It’s the best I have."

I turned it over.

It was workable. Not elegant, but workable, and elegance was not the current priority.

"Is there nothing simpler?" I asked. "Something that doesn’t require logistics."

"To make a woman smile?" Gareth looked at me with the careful expression. "No, Alpha. I don’t think there is." A pause. "Not from where you’re starting."

I looked at the window.

"Fine," I said. "Tell Kade and Bellick to get ready. Find the two women, and manage the details." I turned. "Two hours. We leave in two hours."

He nodded, already moving.

"And Gareth." He stopped. "The veils. Make sure they’re decent."

He left.

Moments later, I was in front of Angel’s room.

I knocked.

No answer.

I opened the door.

She was on the bed.

Not sleeping - lying on her side, facing the window, with the stillness of someone who was awake and looking at something that wasn’t there. There was a book on the bed beside her, closed. The morning light was coming through the window in the long even way of late morning, falling across the covers and across her, and she had not moved when I came in, which told me she was deeper inside her own head than she usually let anyone see.

I stood in the doorway.

Bored, I thought. She’s bored and she’s trying not to be and she’s thinking about Agnes and she’s thinking about all of it and she’s lying very still because being very still is how she manages being somewhere she can’t move.

I crossed the room.

"Are you alright?" I asked.

She looked up, and quickly assembled herself in the space of a breath.

"Yes," she said.

She was not.

I stood there and I looked at her and I searched for the thing to say. The right thing. The thing that Uriel had found easily, that came naturally when I was still pretending to be someone else, when the weight of everything I had done wasn’t sitting in the room between us.

Nothing came that was worthy of her.

"Get dressed," I said. "We leave in two hours."

She sat up. Something moved in her face.

"Where are we going?"

I looked at her.

I smiled.

I did not do this often. Not since Angel came to know the truth.

"Somewhere you’ll like," I said.

I left before I said something that undid it.

***

The two women Gareth found were perfect. They were approximately Angel’s height, with the right build, dressed in the kind of clothes that read as gentlewomen. Gareth had been thorough; he had also procured three veils that were actually well-made - fine cloth, and properly fitted.

Kade and Bellick were already waiting in the courtyard. Kade caught my eye and gave me the look he always gave me when he was doing something at my order that he found personally baffling but was professionally committed to executing.

I held out a veil to each of the two women.

Then I went back upstairs.

I knocked on Angel’s door.

She opened it.

The sight of her, even now, even having looked at her face more times than I could number - landed somewhere sweet in my chest, the way it always did. She had dressed with the care of someone who had decided to take the occasion seriously without knowing what the occasion was. She looked up at me with those eyes and something in my brain briefly stopped working.

I held out the veil.

"For your protection," I said.

She looked at it. Then at me. Then she took it and turned to the small mirror window in the corridor and arranged it properly.

She turned back.

"Alright," she said.

We went down.

The market was everything I had not grown up spending time in, which meant I had no personal experience of what it would do to her, but I watched her face from the moment the stalls came into view - the colour and the noise, and I saw what it did.

The veil concealed her face.

It did not conceal the way her head came up. The way her posture changed - the slight forward lean of someone moving toward something rather than through it.

The people were bowing. Too many of them - it was always like this in the market, the press of it, the continuous murmur of recognition and deference that followed me through public spaces. I acknowledged what I could. Gareth and Bellick and Kade were doing what they were supposed to do. Watching.

"What are we doing here?" Angel’s voice, close to my left shoulder. Soft enough that it was only for me.

"Shopping," I said.

A pause.

"Go with them." I nodded toward the two women. "Walk. Look at what you want."

She was still for a moment.

Then: "You’re serious."

"I’m serious."

I watched her face under the veil - the smile breaking through every other expression on her face. She looked genuinely happy.

She turned toward the stalls and I watched her go, bouncing slightly in glee and happiness. I stood in the market and felt intense satisfaction.

I did that. She is smiling because I put her somewhere that made her smile.

I had put her in other places.

Darker ones.

I looked at the sky briefly and looked back at her moving through the market with the two veiled women following her, and I thought: I will spend whatever time I’m given making better decisions than the ones I’ve made.

Gareth appeared at my right shoulder. "She’s heading for the fabric stall."

"Pay for whatever she takes."

"Already moving, Alpha."

I watched.

Every stall she approached, she moved through with the interest of someone who knew what she liked and was not confused about it. She did not dither. She touched things, considered them, made decisions. Gareth was a shadow behind her, the transaction happening smoothly, the merchants looking slightly dazed by the speed and generosity of the exchange.

My generals were watching the crowd. I was watching her.

After a while - long enough that the sun had shifted - she came back.

She came back smiling.

Her smile reached all the way up and changed everything about her features. The one that had been directed at me on few occasions - as Uriel.

"Thank you," she said. "Truly. I..." She stopped. "Thank you."

"It was my pleasure," I said. And meant it in a way the words didn’t quite carry.

Gareth and Bellick were loading the horses. I helped Angel up - taking her hand, steadying her into the saddle - and she settled and arranged herself and the smile was still there, quieter now but present, the comfortable kind that stayed after the big one finished.

I mounted my own horse.

We set out.

The road back to Black Wolf was the same road we had come in on, and so far, everything was alright. No sign of danger from any angle.

Then I noticed it.

It was subtle at first - the ears, flicking in a way that wasn’t weather or flies, the particular tension in the hindquarters of an animal responding to something internal. I looked at Angel’s horse with the assessment of someone who had spent years reading horses.

"Are you alright?" I asked.

"Fine." She looked down at the horse. "He’s a bit skittish, perhaps, but I’m..."

The horse moved.

It wasn’t a stumble, or a spook. It was a full explosive lurch to the left that had nothing of accident in it - the kind of movement that came from an animal that had made a decision and was executing it completely.

And then it ran.

My world contracted to a single point.

She was on a horse that was running and she was not in control of it and the sound that came from her - the cry for help, her voice cutting through the air and the hoofbeats and everything else - arrived in my chest like a sharp pain.

I was already moving.

My horse responded before I had fully registered giving the command - the years of training, the bond between rider and animal. I gave it everything. We were at full gallop within seconds and I could see her ahead - the veil gone, lost somewhere in the first yards, her hair streaming, both hands on the reins pulling with everything she had against a horse that was not listening.

Faster. I edged my horse on.

I was gaining.

And then I looked past her.

And I understood.

The cliff.

The edge of the territory where the land simply ended - dropped away into something that had no visible bottom beneath all that fog. It was one of the most dangerous zones in the territory. A place where even werewolves cannot survive. I had stood at the edge of that cliff once. Once was enough. Even for something built the way I was built, the cliff had no survivors in its history.

And Angel’s horse was aimed directly at it.

No.

No.

No.

I rode like I had never ridden.