Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint-Chapter 75

Angel’s POV

"I guess I’ll just have to trust you on this." I replied, sealing my fate and handing my life over to Lyra.

Lyra nodded. "Stay close to me, stay low, and don’t make noise." She glanced up at the pale noon sky. "The afternoon light works in our favour. The shadows will be thin but there’s enough ground cover if we use it properly." She gestured left, away from the road. "We take the bushes. Not the road."

"The bushes," I repeated.

"The bushes," she confirmed, already moving.

I followed.

****

We didn’t know how much time passed, but we kept walking. Following the bush path.

The undergrowth along the eastern edge of the wall was thick and unkempt - the kind of vegetation that exists in the space between a settlement and the wilderness beyond it, neither cultivated nor entirely wild, just stubbornly itself. Branches caught at my cloak. Roots seemed to have developed a personal interest in my ankles. At one point I walked directly into a low-hanging bough that deposited a cold shower of collected rainwater directly down the back of my neck and I had to press both hands over my mouth to keep from yelping out loud.

Lyra moved through all of it like she’d been born in undergrowth. Barely a sound. Not a single branch out of place.

I sounded like a horse falling down stairs.

"Quieter," she murmured, not even turning around.

"I’m trying," I mouthed at her back.

She didn’t respond.

We skirted the eastern wall, moving parallel to it but far enough back in the brush that we’d be invisible from any patrol walking the battlements. Once, I caught the sound of voices above - two guards talking - and I froze completely, barely breathing, until Lyra’s hand found my wrist in the dark of the undergrowth and she squeezed once.

Keep moving.

I kept moving.

My slippers had damaged a long time ago. I was literally walking on cloth-covered feet at this point, feeling every root and pebble and patch of cold mud through the soles. My hair was damp. My cloak was snagged in four places. There was something - I chose not to investigate what - stuck to my left sleeve.

And yet somehow none of it was the worst thing I was carrying.

That would be the thing I was not thinking about.

The silver eyes. The crest. The particular quality of his voice saying things weren’t supposed to go this way - like that was something I was supposed to find comfort in. Like the intentions of the man who had given the order made the empty chairs at my family’s table any less empty.

Don’t, I told myself. Not now. Move.

I moved.

We walked for what felt like a long while - long enough for my breathing to adjust, long enough for the sounds of the village to fade behind us into a muffled distant hum.

Then the undergrowth thinned.

And we came out into a clearing.

It wasn’t large - maybe forty feet across, ringed by trees that had grown tall enough to knit their upper branches together into a loose canopy. The ground was a patchwork of overgrown grass and old mud, and in the centre of it, stood the shelter.

It was built of rough stone. The roof was a patchwork of old timber and thatch. A single window, small and shuttered. A door of heavy weathered wood, iron-banded, slightly swollen in its frame from seasons of rain.

"There," Lyra said.

We crossed the clearing quickly - the open space felt exposed after the cover of the brush, and I didn’t fully breathe again until Lyra had her shoulder against the swollen door, forcing it inward with a grinding protest of old hinges.

We went in. She pulled it shut behind us and dropped the iron bar across it.

Inside, it was dim and still.

The light came through the gaps in the thatch and through the cracks around the shutter - thin grey lines of it, enough to see by once my eyes adjusted. The space was a single room, not large - perhaps the size of the bathing chamber in the castle room I’d just fled.

Along one wall, the remnants of old wooden stalls - three of them, the partitions half-collapsed, the latches rusted. Whatever animals had lived here once were long gone, but they’d left behind the ghost of themselves: a smell of old hay and animal warmth. A workbench ran along the opposite wall, its surface bare except for a cracked clay bowl.

In the corner nearest the door, a pile of hay - dry, miraculously, the roof apparently sound enough to have kept the worst of the rain out. Beside it, was a three-legged stool.

I stood in the middle of it and thought: I have slept in worse places.

Which was true, and also one of the saddest true things I had thought in recent memory.

"Sit," Lyra said. "Catch your breath. I need to..." She paused, hand already on the door bar. "Hold on. I need to cover our trails before the scent settles. Stay here. Don’t open this door for anything."

"Where are you..."

But she was already gone, slipping out through a gap she’d made barely wide enough to pass through, pulling the door to behind her.

And I was alone.

I sat on the three-legged stool.

I looked at the cracks in the stone wall opposite me.

I thought: What am I doing here?

The question didn’t have a clean answer. It had several messy ones, all arriving at once.

What was I doing here, in this specific shelter? Running. Obviously.

But what was I doing here - in this territory, in this situation, in this impossible tangle of secrets and a full moon rising tomorrow night that apparently meant something significant for a future I no longer wanted to think about?

Should I have stayed?

The thought arrived before I could stop it.

I let it sit for exactly one moment.

No.

Because staying would have meant what, exactly? Accepting the title that maid had used so easily - his Luna - as though it were simply a fact about me, like my height or the colour of my hair? Accepting that the man who had sat across from me and spoken to me with such careful honesty, who had looked at my untouched breakfast with genuine concern, who had said my name like...

Stop.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.

The fake Alpha - the scarred man - he had made promises. Freedom. Safe passage. He had said the plan had always been to release me.

But he wasn’t the Alpha.

And Terrell - the real Alpha - had made different promises. Safety. Protection. I would show you what it means to be well loved. Except that had been Merrick, hadn’t it? And Terrell had said - what had Terrell said to me, as himself, as the person he actually was and not the one he was pretending to be?

He had looked at my breakfast tray.

He had said eat first.

He had said promise me you won’t do anything rash.

He had looked at me like I was something he was terrified of losing.

And underneath all of that, underneath every conversation and every careful almost-touch and every moment I had filed away somewhere warm and private and stupid...

Underneath all of it, my sister.

The baby.

My mother.

My father.

He gave the order.

I stood up abruptly because sitting still was making it worse, and I paced the three steps from one wall to the other and back, and I thought: He would never let me go. That was the truth of it - whatever else was complicated and painful and bewildering, that part was simple. Terrell was an Alpha who had gone a thousand years without a Luna and had declared his interest in me more times than I could count. He had lied to me for weeks, constructed an entire false identity, let me believe...

He would never let me go.

Which meant I had to be somewhere he couldn’t find me. I had to be somewhere I could breathe and think and figure out what came next, because right now I had nowhere to go and no one waiting for me and the person I might once have turned to for help was the very person I was running from, and that was...

That was the situation.

I stopped pacing.

I sat back on the stool.

I thought: What do I actually do?

The door shifted.

I was on my feet immediately, heart lurching - but it was Lyra, slipping back through her narrow gap, pulling the door shut and dropping the bar back into place.

I opened my mouth.

Then closed it.

Then opened it again.

"What," I said carefully, "is that smell."

Lyra looked entirely unbothered. "Cover."

"Lyra."

"For the scent trail." She crossed to the workbench and set down something wrapped in an old cloth - I chose not to examine it. "There were remnants behind the shelter. Previous owners left rotting stores when they abandoned the place - feed that turned bad, old mash, something that I think was once vegetables." She paused. "And some residual livestock waste that had dried but rehydrated in the rain."

I stared at her.

"You rolled in horse manure."

"I applied it strategically," she corrected, with great dignity, "to our path of entry and the perimeter of the shelter. Any tracker following our scent will hit this wall and lose the thread entirely." She met my eyes. "You’re welcome."

I pressed my sleeve over my nose. "I... yes. Thank you. That was - genuinely very clever and I will appreciate it more once you’re standing further away from me."

She moved to stand by the shutter, peering through the crack at the clearing beyond, and I resettled on the stool and breathed through my mouth.

After a moment of scanning, she turned.

"Tell me what happened," she said.

I looked at her. "Tell me where you’ve been first."

Something shifted in her face - the briefest hesitation. She turned slightly and drew her dress off one shoulder.

The mark was high on her back, below the shoulder blade. Dark ink against her skin - like a brand.

"The Alpha gave us that," she said quietly. "Me and my family. And then he sent us away from the castle immediately." She resettled her dress. "The same day he sent us away, I was already trying to find a way back. You needed to know the truth, and you were walking into something without understanding what it was."

I looked at her steadily. "And?"

"One of his generals found me before I could reach you." A pause. "He held me in his quarters until he could report back to the Alpha about what to do with me."

My mouth fell open. "Lyra. You were held captive against your will? Because you were trying to warn me? That is... that must’ve been awful. I can’t believe you went through all that for me..."

"It wasn’t like that," she said.

"How was it not like..."

"It was..." She looked at the wall. A strange expression moved across her face - something between embarrassment and something else I couldn’t name. "Well, I liked being held captive by him."

I stared at her.

"Lyra."