Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint-Chapter 78

Terrell’s POV

I was done being patient.

Patience was a virtue I had started developing from the moment I saw Angel and knew she was meant for me.

Patience definitely wasn’t for me. I was known for being ruthless and merciless, and that is a part of me I’ll gladly embrace right now.

I stood at the window of my study and watched the last of the evening light bleed out of the sky and I thought, with perfect clarity: enough.

My generals had searched for hours. My guards had combed the village street by street. My best trackers had gone out in wolf form and come back with nothing - nothing - except the report that the scent trail had been deliberately disrupted somewhere near the eastern wall, which told me Angel had help, which told me she hadn’t simply run blind.

Someone was definitely helping her.

I will find my Luna. Drag her back here if I have to. Marry her before the full moon tomorrow and seal this mate bond once and for all. Then I’ll spend the rest of my days, seducing her until she caves in to me.

Running will be the last thing on her mind by the time I’m done with her.

I turned from the window.

My Alpha regalia came off first. I dropped it on the chair without ceremony and replaced it with something plain and dark and practical. A leather outfit. No embellishment. The kind of clothing that didn’t catch light or snag on undergrowth. The kind I usually wear for hunting.

I went to the kennel myself rather than sending someone, because tonight I wasn’t trusting anything to anyone else. Fen was already alert when I arrived - he lifted his great head from his paws and looked at me with amber eyes that understood more than any animal had a right to.

Fen was not a pet. He was a hunting dog in the truest sense - bred across six generations for tracking, with a nose that had followed trails three days cold across thirty miles of broken terrain. He had found things I had given up on finding.

He was going to find her.

I went to Angel’s room first.

Standing in the center of it - her scent still hanging in the air, fading now but present, vanilla and wildflowers and that warm sweetness. I picked up a dress she’d left on the floor by the corner of the bed. The one she’d arrived here with. The one that still carried her warmth.

I held it to Fen’s nose.

He went still.

Then his whole body changed - a transformation that happened when a good dog found a thread worth following. Head lowering. Shoulders dropping. Something in the set of his frame becoming purposeful in a way that had nothing to do with obedience and everything to do with instinct.

"Find her," I said.

We left the castle.

Fen moved fast. Faster than I’d expected even from him - he had the scent strong and he was committed to it, nose skating across the ground as we cleared the village wall through the eastern gate and pushed into the undergrowth beyond.

I stayed close, matching his pace, and for a long stretch of time there was nothing in the world except the push of branches, the soft ground beneath my boots, and the singular focus of moving toward a fixed point.

I ran with Fen through the night and I didn’t let myself think about the look on her face when she understood. I didn’t let myself hear the sound of those two quiet words - get out - or feel the specific quality of silence that had followed them. I didn’t examine the thing that was happening in my chest that I refused to call by its name.

I focused on the trail.

And then Fen stopped.

Not slowed. Stopped. Hard. Four legs planted, head coming up, a short confused sound escaping him - the sound of a dog who has been following something real and has suddenly hit a wall of nothing.

I crouched beside him and breathed in.

The smell hit me immediately.

Rotting grain. Livestock waste. Something deeply, comprehensively foul - layered thick over whatever had been here, deliberate and thorough.

I stayed very still.

She had help. From someone who knows what they are doing.

Someone who knows wolves.

I filed that away.

But I hadn’t come out here to be stopped by rotten vegetables and livestock waste.

I straightened. Looked upward.

Found the tallest tree in a thirty-yard radius - an oak, broad and ancient, its upper branches clearing the canopy - and started climbing.

I went up fast. The bark was rough under my palms and my boots found the branches the way they always had, the way you don’t forget even after centuries, and inside of thirty seconds I was above the canopy and the world had opened up.

The night light lay flat across the landscape - fields, forest, roads, the village at my back, and ahead of me a patchwork of tree cover broken by clearings and the darker shadows of old structures.

I turned slowly.

Scanned.

There.

Movement, in the trees beyond the second clearing. Three figures. Running - one ahead, one close behind, and one slightly trailing.

I knew two of them by the way they moved.

Angel - I would have known her anywhere, the particular rhythm of her, even at this distance, even moving as fast as she was pushing herself.

And the figure whose hand was wrapped around hers.

I looked at him for three seconds.

Recognized the set of those shoulders. The way those long legs covered ground.

The blood that moved through me then was not a cold thing.

It was absolutely, incandescently hot.

Merrick.

I was down from the tree before I’d finished the thought.

I ran.

Not the careful, trail-following pace I’d been using with Fen - something else entirely. The full and unchecked stride of an Alpha who had stopped performing restraint. The ground moved under me in long surges and the trees came and went and I didn’t think about anything except the distance between me and those three figures closing, closing, closing...

I heard Angel’s voice before I broke through the last line of trees. Tired. Strained. I can’t go on. And Merrick’s voice responding - easy, reassuring, the voice I had grown up with and recognized in my bones - and something about hearing him speak to her in that tone, in the dark, with her hand in his - I came through the trees at full speed.