Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Angel’s POV

The horse was not slowing down.

That was the thing my mind kept arriving at and refusing to accept - the simple, terrible fact of it, the animal beneath me running with a completeness that had nothing of panic in it, nothing of a spooked creature seeking escape. This was deliberate. This was aimed. And I was on top of it with no more influence over its direction than a leaf on a current, my hands pulling at the reins until my arms burned and the leather cut into my palms and the horse did not notice and did not care.

"Help..." My voice came out fractured by speed and terror. "Someone... help me..."

The wind was tearing at everything - the veil gone somewhere behind me, my hair everywhere, the world on either side moving too fast to be anything but blur. I could hear something behind me - hoofbeats, fast and closing, and someone’s voice saying my name with an urgency that told me exactly how bad this was...

The cliff appeared.

I had not known it was there. Had no frame of reference for it. One moment there was road and the next there was the end of everything - the land simply stopping, and beyond it the sky, and below it nothing I could see because of the fog, thick and white, swallowing whatever was underneath it.

The horse stopped.

Not gradually. Not slowing. The full, catastrophic halt of something that had arrived where it intended to be - hooves digging in, the whole enormous body locking - and the momentum that had been carrying us both had nowhere to go but forward.

I went forward.

The sensation of leaving the horse was not what I would have described as flying. For the duration of it, it was simply - air. No horse beneath me, no ground, no anything, just the rushing feeling of being in space that was not meant to hold me, and the cliff edge behind me and the fog in front and below and everywhere...

I screamed.

I screamed with everything I had, but the sound disappeared into the fog the way sounds disappeared into fog - absorbed, muffled, gone - and I was falling, and the cliff wall was beside me, and something hit my hands.

Wood.

My hands closed on it before my mind had finished forming the instruction - the pure animal reflex of a body that had decided to survive at all cost. My palms hit the wood and my fingers closed and my whole weight came down on my grip with a force that wrenched every muscle in both arms simultaneously and I screamed again, this time into the fog below me, into the nothing.

Then I stopped falling.

I hung.

I hung from a piece of wood protruding from the cliff face - how it was there, what had put it there, how long it had been there - none of this was available information and none of it mattered. What mattered was that it was there and I was holding it and I was not dead.

Oh God.

I pressed my eyes shut and held on with everything I had and tried to make my breathing do something other than what it was currently doing, which was occurring at twice the necessary speed and providing approximately half the required oxygen.

Breathe.

I breathed.

One breath. Two. The fog swirled around me, damp and cold, pressing against my face and my arms, muffling everything above me.

I opened my eyes.

The cliff wall was right in front of me - stone and moss and the ancient solidity of something that had been here for hundreds of years. The wood I was holding was sunk into a crack in the rock, thick enough to hold me, for now. I looked at it, studying it with my fear stricken mind.

The grain was weathered.

It would not hold forever.

I looked down.

The fog was too thick to show me anything. I had no idea how far I had fallen. I had no idea how far remained. The ground below me - if there was ground below me, if this cliff didn’t simply continue until the center of the earth - was completely invisible.

I looked up.

The fog was thick in that direction too. I could hear nothing. No voices, no hoofbeats, no sound of Terrell or the generals or anyone. Just fog and the distant sound of wind at the top of things.

I screamed for help.

My voice went nowhere.

The fog took it.

I looked at the wood again. Then at the cliff wall beside me. My hands were already beginning to register their objection to the current arrangement - the particular burning of muscles that have been asked to do something they were not designed for and are managing it on determination alone. There was no way I’ll last long here.

I looked along the cliff face.

And there - not far, a few feet to the right, where the rock face changed angle...something. A ledge. Not wide, not welcoming, the narrow kind that spoke of possible rather than comfortable, a rocky step that jutted from the wall like a geological afterthought.

I looked at it.

I looked at my hands.

I looked at the fog below.

Right, I thought. Right, then.

I began to move.

Slowly. The slow that was not about caution so much as about the fact that moving quickly was not an option my body was offering. Hand over hand, inching along the wood toward the cliff face, feeling the grain of it under my palms, feeling the way it shifted - slightly, just slightly, a fractional give that told me the clock was real and was running.

I reached the wall.

The stone under my fingers was real and solid.

I looked at the ledge.

The gap between where I was and where I needed to be was not large. Under other circumstances, it would not have been a meaningful distance at all.

These were not normal circumstances.

I looked at the ledge one last time, then let go of the wood.

The landing was not graceful. It was not anything that could be described as controlled. It was the impact of a person who has made a desperate decision and is now experiencing the full consequences of it - my feet hit the ledge, my knees buckled, my arms went out to the wall and I grabbed at stone with both hands and for one terrible tilting moment the whole thing went the wrong way...

I held.

I pressed my front to the wall and held, both palms flat against the stone, and the ledge held beneath me, and I was on it, and I was not falling.

I stayed like that for a while.

Just breathing.

Then I thanked God, which I did quietly and specifically and with genuine conviction, and I started moving.

The ledge was narrow enough that I kept one hand on the wall at all times - my front pressed to the stone, moving sideways like something cautious, the rock cold and damp under my palms. I did not look down. Looking down was not currently a useful activity.

I moved right.

I had no particular reason for right over left except that left had been where I could see nothing and right was where the fog seemed, perhaps, fractionally thinner. Perhaps. I was not entirely certain this was real rather than a product of a mind looking for any reason to prefer one direction over the other.

I moved right.

I was getting farther from where I had fallen. I understood this. Whoever was above me - if they were looking, if they were calling - would be looking at the wrong place. I was moving away from the point of rescue, toward - what, I didn’t know. I only knew that I needed to find somewhere to stand properly before my legs made the decision for me.

I kept moving right.

And found the cave.

It was not large. It was not welcoming. It was the mouth of something that went back into the cliff face with the particular darkness of somewhere that had not seen light in a very long time, the kind of dark that had texture to it, that felt present.

I stood at the entrance and looked in.

I did not go in.

There are some situations in which wisdom and cowardice arrive at the same answer, and I was not going to judge myself for standing at the entrance of a dark cave in the side of a cliff in the fog and declining to investigate what was inside it.

I sat down at the entrance.

The stone was cold through my skirts. The fog moved around me with its unhurried indifference. I was alive, which was the main thing, and I was on a ledge, which was significantly better than where I had been few minutes ago, and I was going to sit here and gather myself and think about what to do next.

I thought about Terrell’s offer.

What if you had said yes?

What if I was a werewolf right now? What did that change? I would be stronger. Faster. I would be able - probably - to climb this cliff face rather than edge along it. I would be able to hear what was above me, hear voices through the fog. I would be able to defend myself against...

The growl came from inside the cave.

Low. Not distant. Not the sound of something that was far away and uninterested. The sound of something that was close and had heard me sit down and was now coming forward.

My heart stopped.

I am fairly certain it actually stopped, briefly, and then restarted with violent racing.

I did not move.

The growl continued. Getting - louder. Closer.

I moved.

Backward, toward the edge of the ledge, pressing myself as far from the cave entrance as the ledge would allow, which was not very far.

I reached the end.

I looked down.

Fog. Infinite, absolute, merciless fog.

I looked back at the cave entrance.

The darkness inside it was - moving. A shape, at the threshold, with eyes that caught what little light there was and returned it the way animal eyes returned it.

I looked down again.

I looked at the cave.

It was still coming closer.