Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint-Chapter 85

Angel’s POV

Thank you.

The words moved through me like a warm prayer. I had never been entirely sure about the mechanics of prayer but tonight felt like evidence that someone was listening.

Thank you, God. You heard me. You actually heard me.

The moon goddess had spoken. Sheena had declared it in front of everyone - elders, warriors, the sea itself as witness - and the answer was Merrick.

Not Terrell.

Not Terrell.

I didn’t want Merrick either, not particularly, not in the way that would make a marriage sensible - but Merrick had never given an order that ended my family. Merrick had kissed me soft and warm and then helped me run. Merrick was, at absolute minimum, not the man I had been running from since I heard the demise of my family.

Better Merrick. Better anyone. Better absolutely anyone than...

I took a step toward him.

Terrell’s hand closed around my wrist.

"Where are you going?"

I turned. "The moon goddess said..."

"The moon goddess," he said, very quietly, "is wrong."

The elders stirred. Someone inhaled sharply. The warriors at the perimeter exchanged glances.

I stared at him. "You can’t just... you can’t contradict the moon goddess..."

"You belong to me." He said it the way he said everything - with the flat, immovable certainty of a man who had been the most powerful person in every room for so long that the habit had become indistinguishable from his skeleton. "I don’t care what any ritual says. I don’t care what the smoke decided. I know what I know."

"Terrell..."

"Claudia."

His voice carried across the beach like a stone thrown into still water.

And everything stopped.

The murmuring, the shifting, the low undertow of noise that any gathering produces. It didn’t fade. It just - ceased. As though the name itself had reached into the night and switched something off.

Then the whispering started.

Claudia?

He said Claudia.

Is that... did he say...

How? How would he have found...

I looked around at the faces nearest me, reading the shock in them, trying to understand what was happening. The elders were looking at each other with expressions I could only describe as rattled. Warriors who had stood immovable as architecture for the entire ceremony were shifting on their feet. Even the generals - Kade, Gareth, Bellick - were wearing the expression of men who had known this was coming and were still finding the reality of it startling.

Then I saw Sheena.

Sheena, who had performed an entire moon goddess ritual without her hands trembling once, who had faced Terrell’s fury with the composure of a woman in complete command of her position - Sheena had gone the colour of sea foam.

Her eyes were fixed on a point behind me.

I turned.

The figure came from the treeline at the back of the beach.

Old. Extraordinarily, almost impossibly old. She moved slowly, with a walking staff of dark wood, and every step was deliberate and unhurried, as though she had long ago made peace with the fact that she would arrive when she arrived and the world could wait.

Her robes were nothing like Sheena’s - no ceremony, no careful arrangement. They were dark and layered and worn out. Her hair was white and unbound and fell past her shoulders, wild and weightless in the sea air.

Her face.

I looked at her face and felt something I couldn’t name move through me - not fear exactly, but something adjacent to it. Something that recognized, on a level below thought, that this was not an ordinary person. The lines were deep. Her eyes, when they found the gathering, were dim and ancient.

She found Terrell and inclined her head - not deference, not submission. Recognition. The nod of one significant person to another.

Beside me I felt Merrick take a single step backward.

I glanced at him.

He had gone very still. The sheepish ease he’d been wearing since Sheena’s announcement had evaporated, replaced by something controlled and watchful, and he was looking at Claudia with the expression of a man rapidly recalculating his escape.

Sheena spoke first, and her voice only shook slightly, which I suspected took enormous effort.

"She’s been banished," she said, addressing Terrell with a desperate voice. "Claudia was stripped of her title and cast out for treason - everyone here knows this. Whatever powers she once held, the goddess would have withdrawn them. Her banishment was absolute. You can’t simply..."

"Sheena." Terrell’s voice was pleasant. Terrifyingly pleasant. "I am using every piece of self-control I currently possess to avoid doing something I would find briefly and satisfyingly inconvenient." His eyes didn’t move from Claudia. "Do not speak again."

Sheena’s mouth closed.

I watched her hands, folded in front of her, grip each other until the knuckles whitened.

Terrell turned to the gathering and let his gaze move across them.

"You all know who she is," he said. Not a question. "The high priestess before Sheena’s mother. The most powerful invoker in recorded history of this territory - in any territory, by most accounts." He paused. "She was accused of treason three decades ago. I have spent the last few days investigating those accusations." Another pause. "The charges were fabricated. She was removed because someone wanted her position and had enough influence to engineer her removal." His eyes moved briefly to Sheena, then away. "She has been restored. Tonight she will conduct the confirmation ritual, and only her result will I accept."

The elder nearest me let out a long breath that sounded like it had been held for approximately three decades.

"I..." I started.

But Claudia had begun to move.

She didn’t ask for space. She didn’t arrange anything or request materials or consult with anyone. She simply walked to the water’s edge and stood there for a moment with the sea almost touching the hem of her robes, her staff planted in the wet sand beside her, her face turned upward toward the moon.

And then she began.

No words at first. Just sound - low and rhythmic and coming from somewhere in her chest that didn’t seem physically possible given her size, a vibration more than a voice, something that seemed to travel through the sand and up through the soles of my feet and into my bones before I’d processed it with my ears.

The fire that Sheena had built - the blue-flame - flared.

Then it changed colour. Blue to white to something I didn’t have a name for, a colour that existed at the edge of visible light and made my eyes water if I looked directly at it.

I took a step back without deciding to.

The sea moved.

The water nearest the shore pulled back in a smooth arc, further than tides moved, revealing a stretch of dark wet sand that gleamed in the impossible light of the fire, and then it held there, suspended, as though it had been asked to wait.

Oh, I thought. Oh, this is different.

The trees at the beach’s edge began to sway - all of them, simultaneously, in the same direction, though the sea breeze was moving in the opposite direction. The sound they made was not wind in leaves. It was something older.

The clouds above the moon gathered and then parted and then gathered again in a pattern that was too deliberate to be weather.

And the sand.

The sand around Claudia’s feet was moving - not blowing, not disturbed by wind, but rising, grain by grain, spiraling upward around her in lazy orbits like she had become the center of something gravitational.

I grabbed the nearest arm without looking to see whose it was.

It was Terrell’s.

I registered this and did not let go.

Claudia was turning now - slow rotations, her arms lifting from her sides, her staff somehow staying planted while she moved around it, her white hair lifting into the impossible wind. And as she turned she was... she was changing.

That was the only word I had for it.

The deep lines of her face were smoothing. Not disappearing - not becoming young exactly - but the weight of age was lifting from her posture, her shoulders drawing back, her spine straightening inch by inch until she was standing at a height I was certain she hadn’t been standing at when she walked out of the trees. Her movements quickening, her gestures expanding, becoming fluid.

She didn’t look old anymore.

She looked like what she was.

"I’m scared," I said, to no one in particular.

Nobody contradicted me.

The invocation reached a pitch that I felt in my back teeth, in the centre of my chest, behind my eyes - and then Claudia stopped turning and faced the moon directly and spoke.

Not in any language I knew. Not in the old tongue that Sheena had used for her ritual - something further back than that, something that didn’t sound like language at all and simultaneously sounded like the only language that had ever mattered. The words arrived in the air and stayed there.

The sea surged back in.

The fire went out.

Complete darkness for one terrible second.

Then the moon, freed of every cloud, blazed down with a light so direct that the beach was brighter than midday, every face lit white and shadowless, every expression visible to everyone.

Claudia lowered her arms.

The sand fell.

The trees stilled.

The sea found its natural rhythm again, gentle, as though it had never moved any other way. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

And the silence was so complete that when Claudia finally spoke - in plain language, in the tongue we all understood - every word landed with a heavy weight.

"She belongs to both."

I stopped breathing.

"The bond is shared. The Luna is fated to both the Alpha and his twin brother."