The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

CHAPTER THREE: THE DISGUSTED ALPHA

DAMIEN POV

The hospital wing was cool and white and smelled like medication and cut flowers, and I hated being in it.

I stood at the window and looked at the garden below. Someone had planted early season roses along the east wall, pale pink ones that Rose had admired from this window three weeks ago when she could still stand without help. She had not stood at this window since.

"Cameron, will you turn around."

My sister's voice. I turned.

Nadia was seated in the chair beside Rose's bed, her back straight, her hands clasped. She had been running the pack's administrative affairs for six months while I refused to leave this room for longer than three hours at a stretch. She looked tired in the way efficient people look tired, neatly and without complaint.

"I turned around," I said.

"Then look at her, not at me."

I looked at Rose.

She was propped against two pillows, her copper hair loose on her shoulders. The light in this room was carefully managed. Nadia had insisted on lamps instead of overheads because overhead light made Rose's skin look worse than it was, and I had agreed because agreeing was the only useful thing I could do. She was thin in ways that still reached inside my chest and squeezed. A year ago she had trained with the pack's female warriors. Eight months ago she had baked bread in our kitchen and thrown flour at me for being grim. Three months ago she had stopped eating solid food without being reminded.

She was watching me with her dark green eyes and she had that expression she wore when she had decided something and was waiting for me to catch up.

"You've already decided," I said.

"I decided months ago," she said. Her voice was soft but her diction was still precise. The illness had not touched her clarity. "I'm telling you now because you ran out of time to keep avoiding it."

I moved from the window. I sat in the chair on the other side of her bed, the one that had left an indentation in the shape of my presence. "There has to be another way."

"There isn't," Nadia said. "We've looked. For eight months, Damien. There is no other legal path that satisfies the blood rite and keeps the Council from moving against you before winter."

"The Council can—"

"Matthias has seventeen votes," Nadia said, cutting me off with the flatness of someone who had said this before. "Seventeen. He needs nineteen to call a succession challenge. He has been working on those last two votes for three months. Without a legitimate heir confirmed by the blood rite, he will have them before the winter session."

I stared at the floor.

Matthias Crane. A man whose name tasted like rust in my mouth. He had been positioning himself since my father's death, moving carefully, building alliances, wearing the polite face of a loyal pack member while excavating the ground beneath my feet. I knew what he was. I had known him since we were boys and he broke a younger child's arm at training and told the instructors the boy had fallen. He was the most patient predator I had ever encountered and he had been waiting for exactly this.

A throne without an heir was an argument Matthias could win.

"I understand the political situation," I said. "What I don't understand is how I'm supposed to do this."

Rose's hand moved across the blanket toward me. I took it.

"Because I'm asking you to," she said. "And because when I'm gone, there will be a child who carries both of us forward. That matters to me, Damien. It matters more than you know."

"You are not going anywhere," I said, and my own voice came out rougher than I meant.

She squeezed my fingers. "The doctors say differently."

"The doctors are not always right."

"They are right this time." She held my gaze steadily. "The surrogate comes from Luna Isabelle's pack. MoonStone. There are volunteers. The woman will be vetted. The blood rite is ancient and precise, and the priestess has performed the bond suspension before. It won't hurt me."

"You don't know that."

"I do," Nadia said from across the bed. "I consulted with the priestess for two hours, Damien. The suspension is temporary. Forty-eight hours. It protects Rose from the bond feedback."

I looked at my mate's hand in mine. She had fine bones, Rose. Her mother used to say she was built for speed, not weight. She had been quick, once.

"I don't want to look at the candidate files," I said.

Nadia made a sharp sound. "Damien—"

"I don't want photographs. I don't want background reports. Luna Isabelle can conduct the screening. If the medical results are satisfactory, I'll do one interview, and I'll choose based on the interview. Nothing else."

"That's a terrible process," Nadia said.

"Then I apologize for my terrible process."

"You are deliberately making this harder than it needs to be."

"Yes," I said. "I am."

Nadia pressed her lips together and let the silence sit.

Rose turned her head toward me. "What is it, really? What is the part you can't say?"

I was quiet for a while. Outside the window, the rose canes moved slightly in the wind.

"My father did this," I said.

Neither of them spoke.

"His first mate was sick. He found a woman. She carried Nadia and me. And then she disappeared from every record the pack kept. My father never mentioned her name. The woman who gave him heirs became nothing. A blank in the archive." I looked at the window. "I swore I would never do to a person what he did."

The room was very quiet.

Rose's thumb moved slowly across the back of my hand. "Then don't do what he did," she said. "The surrogate is not a blank. She is a person who needs something we can provide, and we have something she can provide. That does not have to be monstrous."

I looked at her.

"Go do the interview," she said. "Choose carefully. And remember that whoever she is, she is not the enemy."

I stood up. I pressed my mouth to Rose's forehead and held it there for a moment. She smelled like the lavender she kept on her nightstand.

"Three days," I said against her hair.

"Three days," she agreed.

I walked to the door. Nadia followed me out into the corridor.

"You'll read the files," she said, once the door was closed.

"I'll do the interview."

"Damien."

"I'll do the interview, Nadia." I turned to face her. "And whoever she is, she will be a contractor. She will be treated with basic dignity and she will leave when the contract ends. There will be no confusion about what she is here for."

Nadia looked at me with the expression she had been wearing since we were children, the one that meant she was deciding whether to push further or store the argument for later.

She stored it.

"The convoy leaves at seven," she said. "Don't be late."