Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint Chapter 72

Angel’s POV

I nodded, promising not to do anything rash or stupid, even though my heart was already racing at everything.

I was genuinely scared now.

Terrell sat on the edge of the bed. Then he looked at and patted the space beside him. "Co sit with ."

I went and sat down, looking at his profile while I waited.

"You’re probably wondering," he began slowly, like he was picking his way across unstable ground, "why you’ve been here alone. Why the Alpha hasn’t co to speak with you. Why no one has said anything to you about what happens next."

I said nothing. I just watched him struggle with whatever was locked behind his teeth, and I nodded once.

He exhaled. "It’s because the Alpha isn’t truly the Alpha."

I stared at him.

"What?"

"The man who ca to take you from Hawkins Castle," he said carefully. "The man who rode with you, the one everyone called Alpha..."

"He wasn’t?" I heard my own voice from sowhere slightly outside myself. "He was pretending? All of that - the authority, the way everyone deferred to him, the way he..." I stopped. Shook my head. "He was just filling in?"

Terrell nodded. "He was filling in for the true Alpha. Yes."

I turned that over. And over. Trying to find the angle at which it made sense.

"So the scarred man," I said slowly. "The one I stabbed because I believed he was the monster who murdered my family... the one I was supposed to be married to..." My voice cracked on the word. "He wasn’t even the real Alpha."

"No."

A heavy panic had begun to move through . The kind that doesn’t announce itself loudly - it just quietly dismantles everything you thought was solid ground beneath your feet, until you look down and find you’ve been standing on nothing at all.

I pressed my hands together in my lap. Breathed in through my nose.

"If he isn’t the Alpha, then who is?"

Silence.

"Who is the Alpha, Uriel?" My voice ca out very quiet. "Who is the man that destroyed my life? Who is the monster that killed my sister, her baby, my parents... everyone I..."

I couldn’t finish the sentence.

Terrell didn’t answer with words.

He looked down at his own chest. And slowly, deliberately, he touched the crest sewn into his garnt.

I’d noticed it before - of course I had. It was impossible not to. Heavy. Dark. The black wolf symbol that looked like it carried the weight of sothing ancient, sothing that ant authority in a language older than speech.

I looked at it.

I looked up at his eyes.

And the world cracked open.

Oh my God.

I was on my feet before I even knew I’d moved.

Horror hit first - pure, white, animal horror - and then everything else ca rushing in behind it in a wave so large I couldn’t identify individual emotions anymore. There was just the wave. There was just the impact.

"H... how..." My voice wasn’t working right. My legs weren’t working right. I was staggering backward, my heel catching on nothing, and I felt the hot press of tears before I even understood I was crying. "You... you..."

My back hit the wall.

He killed my family.

He killed my family.

Everything the maid had been trying to say made sense now.

Uriel didn’t exist. Terrell did. The Alpha who fitted my description and who had a twin.

This man - this man who had looked at with those kind eyes, who had sat with and spoken to and made feel like soone worth protecting - this man had given the order that ended every life I had ever loved.

"You killed them." The words tore out of like sothing bleeding. "You killed my sister. She just gave birth - she had a little baby boy - and you..."

He stood. Took a step toward .

I flinched so violently I felt it in my spine.

He stopped.

Good. Good. He should stop. He should stay exactly where he was and never take another step toward for as long as either of us lived.

"Angel..."

"Don’t." The word ca out like a slamd door.

But he kept talking.

I don’t know what I expected. Denial, maybe. Or cold indifference - that would have been easier, actually. Easier to hate sothing that showed no remorse. But instead his voice was low and unsteady and filled with sothing that sounded dangerously like anguish, and sohow that was worse.

He was saying sothing about how it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. That he hadn’t known my family was part of the pack he’d attacked. That by the ti he knew - by the ti he knew whose family his Luna ca from - it was already over and there was nothing left to undo.

He was saying sothing about how the plan had been to bring out of Hawkins and then release . Set free. That he’d never wanted to trap .

He was saying sothing about falling in love.

He was saying my na like it hurt him.

And I stood against that wall and I felt every word land on like stones dropped from a great height, and at so point - I don’t know when exactly - I stopped being able to hear him.

Not because he had gone quiet.

But because there was a roaring in my ears that drowned everything out. The roaring of every mory I carried - my sister’s laugh, my mother’s hands braiding my hair, the sound my father made when he was reading sothing that amused him - all of it rising up at once, all of it pressing against the inside of my chest demanding to be acknowledged. Demanding to be mourned.

They’re dead. They have always been dead. And he is the reason.

I don’t know how long he talked.

It felt like a very long ti.

And then - very quietly, from sowhere I didn’t know I still had - I found one last thing.

"Get out."

Two words. Barely above a whisper. But sothing in the quality of my own voice frightened , because I had never heard myself sound like that before. Not angry. Not hysterical. Just - done. Finished. Emptied of everything except the single, absolute need for him to not be in the sa room as .

He stopped talking.

The sudden silence was enormous.

He just stood there. And the seconds stretched and I felt my patience - the last fraying thread of it - begin to snap, and I raised my eyes to his face.

I don’t know what he saw there.

Whatever it was, it made him take a step back.

And then he left.

The door closed.

And I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor, knees drawn to my chest, and I pressed my face into my hands and I let myself fall apart in a way I hadn’t allowed since the day they told everyone was gone.