The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

CHAPTER SIX: COLD, BUT NOT CRUEL

The road to Silver Ridge took four hours.

I sat in the back of the escort vehicle and watched the country change. The soft low hills of MoonStone went away. The trees got taller and darker. The roads narrowed and then opened up wide again, laid out straight, like somebody built them expecting them to last three hundred years.

The driver told me his name was not important. He confirmed my name, confirmed where we were going, and did not speak again.

I slept maybe twenty minutes in the second hour. Not real sleep. Just an absence. I woke up with my cheek against cold glass and a knot in my left shoulder.

We reached the compound just after eleven.

I had expected a house.

The Alpha's residence sat back from a circular drive, wide and dark and built out of stone, three floors of tall windows with climbing plants trained up the walls. The grounds were perfect. Guards at the gate. Guards at the door. Men in dark clothes who watched us pull in without moving a muscle.

Luna Margarethe was waiting on the steps. She came down as I climbed out.

"You made good time. How was the drive?"

"Long."

"How are you feeling?"

I thought about it. "Functional."

She looked at me a moment. "That's honest." She turned toward the doors. "Your room first. The interview is at two. You'll have time to eat and change."

Inside was cold. Not the temperature. The feeling of it. High ceilings. Dark floors. Big rooms with almost nothing in them. Everything expensive in the quiet way that expects you to already know what things cost.

Two maids passed us in the hallway and neither of them looked at me.

My room was on the second floor and it was bigger than any room I have ever slept in. A dark bed frame. White bedding. A window over the garden. A wardrobe already stocked with basics somebody had put there in advance. A little desk with a notepad and a pen.

Luna Margarethe showed me where my own things could go, then sat down in the chair by the window.

"I'll tell you something I couldn't say in MoonStone."

I set my bag on the bed and turned around.

"Alpha Ronan is not a warm man. Not with strangers. Not with anybody he hasn't chosen to trust. He will look at you like he is hunting for a reason to end the conversation early. That is how he is built. It isn't cruelty. It's how he keeps himself standing."

"I know how to handle cold."

"I'm not asking you to handle it. I'm asking you not to read it as rejection before you've said a word." She folded her hands. "There is a difference between a cold man and a cruel one. Ronan Blackwood is not cruel."

I nodded.

"His sister Vera will be in the room. Possibly his Beta." She stood. "Be straight with him. The other girls will try to impress him. He doesn't want to be impressed. He wants to believe this will be simple." She stopped at the door. "And Naima. Whatever your reasons are, don't lie about them. He'll know."

She left me alone.

I sat on the edge of that enormous bed. The ceiling was very high. Through the window I could see a garden full of white flowers I did not recognize.

And under the floorboards, faint, I could hear a machine running. A soft tick, spaced too even to be anything a house does by itself.

Somewhere below my feet, a woman was being kept alive.

I ate lunch alone in a small dining room off the kitchen. A woman brought soup and bread and did not speak to me. I got through most of the soup and none of the bread. My stomach had been closed since six that morning.

At one-forty I put on the dark green dress. I tied my hair back. I looked at my face in the mirror and decided I looked like a woman who was not going to fall apart in public, which was the best I could honestly claim.

They took me to the study at five to two.

Dark wood. Tall windows. Bookshelves on two walls, full and in order. A desk big enough to sleep on. Three chairs set out in a triangle, two facing one.

Vera Blackwood was already sitting down. Sharp face, dark eyes, a closed file on her lap. She looked up when I came in and held the look a beat too long.

Ronan Blackwood was at the window with his back to the room.

I had been told he was big. Big is not the word. He was wide enough through the shoulders that the window frame behind him looked badly built. He stood like a man who is used to rooms rearranging themselves around him, and who stopped noticing years ago.

He did not turn around when I came in.

I sat in the single chair. The leather was cold through my dress.

Vera opened her file, read it, and looked at me.

"Naima Vale. Twenty-one. Unmarked. MoonStone Pack. No previous pregnancies. Medically cleared, full panel, no concerns."

"That's right."

"Why did you volunteer?"

I had an answer ready. I threw it away.

"My uncle is the executor of my father's estate. He spent two years running it into debt on purpose so he could arrive at a crisis point and offer to fix it in exchange for something I was never going to give him." My voice stayed level. "This contract was a different door. I took it."

Vera was quiet for a second.

The man at the window still had not moved.

"So the money was the main reason."

"Yes."

"Not the alliance. Not duty to your pack."

"No."

"That's an unusual amount of honesty."

"I was told not to lie."

Vera's eyes went to the window. Something passed between them that I could not read.

He turned around.

I had looked at enough photographs online to build a version of him in my head, and the version was wrong the way photographs are always wrong about very large people. A hard face. Heavy jaw. Black hair. Gray eyes that go darker or lighter depending on where the light is. He looked like a man who had not slept in a long time and had arranged his face so nobody could use that against him.

He crossed the room, sat down beside his sister, and looked straight at me.

I held it. I do not know how, but I held it.

"You said your uncle wanted something from you." His voice was exactly what I had been warned about. Deep, with gravel in it, the voice of a man who gives orders across large rooms. "What did he want?"

I had not expected that question.

Nobody in that clinic had asked it. It was a box on a form. It was a line in a file.

He asked it out loud, and he waited.

"Me," I said. "The use of me. Whenever he wanted, for as long as he wanted. In exchange for taking on the debt."

The room went very quiet.

Something happened behind his eyes. It was gone before I could name it.

"And this contract is better," he said.

"This contract has an end date," I said. "And it doesn't ask me to belong to anybody forever."

He looked at me for a long moment. Not with pity. I would have hated pity. He looked at me like a man weighing what I said against something inside himself that I could not see.

"If I choose you," he said, "you live in this compound for the whole year. You follow the rules of this house. You don't leave the territory without permission. When the child is born, you go home. There is no discussion, no negotiation, and no contact afterward. Do you understand that."

"I understand."

"There will be nothing between us outside what the contract requires. No relationship. No feeling."

"I don't want a relationship," I said. "I want five hundred thousand tokens and a bus ticket home."

Something moved in his face. One muscle near his jaw let go, barely, for less than a second.

I decided I had imagined it.

I have thought about that half-second more times than I will ever admit to anyone.

He stood.

"I'll give Luna Margarethe my answer tonight."

He walked back to the window.

The Beta stepped away from the wall. I had not registered him until that moment, a lean man standing with his hands behind his back. He opened the door. I stood, nodded at Vera, and walked out.

In the corridor I put my back against the cool wall and breathed.

My phone buzzed. Junie.

How did it go???

Don't know yet. Waiting.

Three dots.

How was he?

I stared at the question.

I thought about the way he asked what my uncle wanted. Straight out. No apology in front of it. The question of a man who has heard enough careful answers to stop putting up with them.

I thought about that half-second near his jaw.

Cold, I typed. But not cruel.

I put the phone away and stood in the corridor of a house that was not mine, in a territory I did not know, waiting to find out whether a man who had barely looked at me was about to own the next year of my life.

Down the hall, a door opened.

A nurse came out with a covered tray and turned the other way without seeing me. Behind her, through the open doorway, I heard it clearly for the first time. The machine I had heard through my floor. Ticking away, steady and patient, counting out what was left of somebody.

I knew who was in that room.

I stood absolutely still and listened to the sound of Seraphine Blackwood's life being measured out in seconds.

The nurse had not closed the door.

And from inside that room, warm and unhurried and wide awake, a woman's voice said:

"Is that the Vale girl standing in my hallway?"

Somebody answered her too quietly for me to hear.

"Then bring her in," Seraphine Blackwood said. "I've waited three days to meet the one I picked."