Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint-Chapter 82

Alpha Terrell’s POV

I lasted only three hours.

Three hours of lying on my back staring at the ceiling while my mind ran the same circuit over and over - the loose window latch I’d tightened, the door I’d locked, the guards posted in the corridor - checking and rechecking the mental inventory of every possible exit from that room like a man counting coins he doesn’t trust himself to have actually counted.

It wasn’t enough.

I got up, pulled on a shirt, and went down the corridor.

The guard outside her door straightened when he saw me. I dismissed him with a look, took out my key, and let myself in.

The room was dark - the candles long since burned down, the moonless night pressing flat against the windows. I locked the door behind me and stood still while my eyes adjusted.

There.

The shape of her under the covers, one arm curled beneath her head, her hair spread dark across the pillow. The slow, even rhythm of her breathing. Completely, peacefully, unconscious.

Something in my chest that had been braced all evening quietly released.

I had been half-convinced I’d open this door and find the room empty again. Find a knotted rope of bedsheets out the window or a loosened floorboard or some other evidence of the particular creative desperation she had already demonstrated she was entirely capable of.

Instead she was just - sleeping.

I crossed to the chair by the window and sat down.

Her scent reached me immediately. Vanilla and wildflowers and that warm sweetness that had no rational explanation - she had told me herself she wore no fragrance, and I had believed her, which meant it was simply her, simply the way she existed in space, and that was somehow worse for my sanity than if it had been manufactured.

I leaned back in the chair.

Closed my eyes.

Just for a moment, I told myself.

I was asleep inside of four minutes.

**

The morning light woke me.

It came through the window in a long pale shaft that landed directly across my face. I opened my eyes and for exactly two seconds existed in the comfortable blankness of someone who hasn’t yet remembered where they are or why.

Then I remembered.

I turned my head.

Angel was sitting up in the bed.

The morning light was doing something unreasonable - catching the warmth of her skin, the soft curves of her against the white of the bedclothes, her hair loose and thick around her shoulders. She was looking directly at me with eyes that were fully awake and carrying, even at this hour, a quantity of cold fury that was almost impressive.

We looked at each other.

"What," she said, very precisely, "are you doing in my room."

"Checking on you."

"You checked. Now leave."

"It’s not that simple..."

"It is exactly that simple." She pulled the covers up slightly, not from modesty - more the way someone picks up a shield. "You have a perfectly functional room of your own.

Go back to it."

"I wasn’t sure you’d still be here in the morning."

"Well." Her voice was acid and honey in equal measure. "I’m here. You’ve seen me. Congratulations. Leave."

I looked at her - sitting in the morning light with her fury wrapped around her like armour, her eyes burning, her jaw set - and thought about what I would give to go back. Not to the beginning, not to all of it - just to one specific moment. One choice, made differently. One truth, spoken before it became a wound.

"Later today," I said, standing, "they’ll come to dress you for the ceremony."

The temperature in the room dropped.

"What ceremony."

"Tonight. The full moon." I kept my voice even. "The marriage rites."

She stared at me.

Then something broke open in her expression. She was out of the bed and across the room before I fully registered she’d moved, and what came out of her was not a single sentence but an entire avalanche, and she delivered it from two feet away with her eyes blazing and her voice shaking with the force of keeping it controlled.

"I will never marry you." Each word landed with weight. "Do you understand me? Not under a full moon, not under any moon, not in any ceremony, not in any world where I have any say in the matter whatsoever. You are a monster.You are the thing people tell their children about to make them afraid of the dark. You have burned and destroyed and killed your way across every territory anyone has ever mentioned to me and you stand there in my room in the morning like you have any right to..."

"Angel..."

"Don’t say my name like that." Her voice cracked. "You don’t get to say it like that. You lost the right to say it like that." She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth for a moment. Breathed. Lowered it. "You are not a husband. You are not a mate. You are the man who killed my family and I will stand in front of your moon goddess and your full moon and your entire pack and kill you if you drag me to that ceremony."

I said nothing.

She was breathing hard. Her eyes were wet but the tears weren’t falling - held back by pure force of will, which was so entirely her.

"You will marry me," I said quietly. "Tonight. And that is the last time I’ll say it."

I turned and walked out before she could respond.

The sound that followed me through the door was something between fury and grief, and I carried it with me down the corridor and didn’t put it down.

**

Angel’s POV

I stood in the center of the room long after the door locked and breathed.

In.

Out.

In.

He was going to do it. He was actually, genuinely, with the complete and terrifying certainty of a man who had never once been told no and had it stick - he was going to do it.

Then don’t let him get you to the ceremony.

I seized that thought.

But I couldn’t escape the room - I had checked every window last night with the thoroughness of someone who had learned from previous failures, and he had sealed them all completely. The door was solid and the lock was beyond anything I could manage without Lyra’s tools and Lyra was in a dungeon.

But the room was not the ceremony.

Between here and wherever the ceremony was held there would be movement - corridors, stairs, open spaces. There would be moments of inattention, gaps in the formation, opportunities that a person paying attention might find.

I would pay attention.

I sat back on the bed and I thought very carefully and I waited.

The day moved strangely.

I didn’t see Terrell. I half expected him to reappear - to station himself in the corner and watch me the way he’d watched me sleep, but the room stayed empty except for the intervals when the door opened.

Kade came with my meals. Both times.

He said nothing beyond what was necessary - set the tray, checked the room with a sweep of his eyes, and left. But the second time, as he reached the door, he paused with his back to me.

"Eat something," he said. Not unkindly. "You’ll need it."

Then he left.

I looked at the untouched first tray and the fresh second one and thought about Terrell carrying a dinner tray down a corridor himself last night, and pushed the thought away.

I ate.

I needed my strength.

When darkness fell, the door opened for the third time.

Three maids.

I had never seen any of them before, which meant they had been chosen specifically for tonight - no familiar faces, no possible allies, no one I might have had even one conversation with. Terrell had thought of that too.

They carried something between them.

The regalia was - I didn’t have a word for it. I had never in my life been in proximity to anything like what they unfolded in the center of my room.

White, but not simply white - layered fabric that caught the candlelight and gave it back differently, like something alive. Embroidery at the hem and the sleeves in silver thread, the black wolf crest worked into the bodice in an intricate pattern. A cloak lined in something dark and soft. Pieces of jewellery laid out on the bedside table one by one.

I stood and I looked at all of it and I thought: the corridor.

"Arms up, my lady," the first maid said, not unkindly.

I lifted my arms.

I would get to the corridor.

And then I would find my moment.

Sheena’s POV

The guard outside the lower cells was young. Newer. The kind of posting assigned to warriors who hadn’t yet been tested, because the dungeon on a normal night required presence more than competence.

Tonight was not a normal night.

I walked down the corridor with my hands folded in front of me.

The guard saw me coming and straightened with the instinct of someone who knew my face.

"My lady Sheena, the lower cells aren’t..."

I opened my right hand and blew.

The powder was very fine - ground from three specific dried roots that I had sourced carefully and stored longer than I’d originally planned for. Colourless. Odourless until the moment of dispersal.

The guard inhaled.

Then slumped and collapsed.

I took his keys, walked toward Merrick’s cell and inserted it.

Merrick was on his feet before the door was fully open.

He had clearly not slept. His hair was dishevelled and stripped of its usual ease.

He’d definitely been thinking about her.

"Sheena." His voice was controlled.

"We need to move quickly," I said. "The ceremony starts at moonrise - we have perhaps an hour."

He was already through the door. "How did you..."

"Later." I turned and moved back down the corridor. "Are you hurt?"

"No." His footsteps behind me were quiet. "Does he know you’re doing this?"

"He told me to prepare the marriage rites." I didn’t break stride. "He didn’t specify which marriage."

A brief pause. "Sheena."

"If Angel is truly the shared mate of both the Alpha and his twin, then sealing a bond with only one of you is a violation of sacred law that even Terrell cannot undo by deciding to ignore it."

"My lady!"

Lyra’s voice, through the bars, with a pitch of desperation that cut through the dungeon quiet.

I did not stop walking.

"Please..." Her voice followed us toward the stairs. "Please, I helped her... I was only trying to help..."

Merrick glanced back once.

I put my hand briefly on his arm. "No. We don’t have time. We must leave her."

He held the glance for one more second.

Then he turned and followed me up the stairs.

Behind us, in the corridor, Lyra’s voice finally fell quiet.

The door at the top of the stairs swung open onto the night.

Above us, heavy and gold and enormous and rising, the full moon had begun its climb.