The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

CHAPTER THREE: THE PAPER GOWN

I called my mother from the car with the engine off.

She picked up on the second ring, her voice small and careful, the voice she uses when she has been crying and does not want me to know.

"Are you home?"

"Soon. Is Elias there?"

"He made soup." A pause. "Naima. What aren't you telling me?"

"Nothing you need tonight," I said. "I love you. Lock the door."

I hung up and sat in the dark with my hands on the wheel for a while. Then I drove home through the quiet streets and went to bed without turning on the light, because I did not need to see the room to know where everything was.

I got that from her.

By eight the next morning there were twenty-two of us left.

Sixty women filled that hall the night before. In one night, thirty-eight of them did the arithmetic a second time and came back with a different answer.

I did not blame a single one of them.

They had taken over the east wing of the MoonStone clinic. Silver Ridge machines stood in the hallway, half out of their crates. Silver Ridge staff moved around us in gray uniforms with the flat politeness of people who had done this in three other packs already. A folding table by the door. A woman who took my name, my identification, and a photograph.

"Face forward. Don't smile."

The flash went off before I finished arranging my face.

"Row three. They'll call you."

Row three was eight plastic chairs against a wall the color of weak tea. Delphine Castellane sat at the end of it in a coat worth more than our mortgage, scrolling her phone with two fingers.

I sat down four seats away.

"You're the Vale girl," she said, without looking up.

"Naima."

"I know." She swiped. "My father says your uncle is selling your house out from under you."

There is a skill to saying something cruel so lightly that reacting makes you the rude one. Pack daughters learn it before they learn to drive. I had watched them practice it on each other at festivals since I was twelve.

"Your father's well informed," I said.

"My father is the Beta." She finally looked up. Her eyes were pale brown, almost gold, and there was nothing stupid in them at all. "You think I'm here for the money."

"I hadn't thought about you at all."

Something moved across her face. It was not hurt. It was interest, and it was worse.

"Five hundred thousand tokens is what my father spends in a month," she said. "I'm here because a Castellane inside Silver Ridge when the succession fight starts is worth ten times that. You should understand what you've walked into." She went back to her phone. "There are two reasons to want this contract. Yours is the one that gets you sent home."

They called her name before I could answer.

She stood, handed me her coat like I was staff, and walked through the door.

I folded it and put it on the chair.

The screening took four hours.

Blood first. Three vials. The technician talked to the woman at the next station the whole time about a restaurant she had been to on Saturday.

Then height. Weight. Hips measured with a tape. A hand spread flat across my stomach and a number read out loud to a room that wrote it down.

Then hormones. Then a scan, cold gel, the screen turned away from me.

Then the paper gown.

A Silver Ridge doctor came in with a tablet and did not tell me her name. Fifties. Gray-blonde. Reading glasses pushed up into her hair.

"Age at first cycle."

"Twelve."

"Regular?"

"Yes."

"Number of previous s****l partners."

I looked at her.

"It's on the form." She did not look up. "I have to put something."

"Two."

"Pregnancies. Terminations. Miscarriages."

"None."

"Any history of coercion or assault that would affect your ability to agree to this contract."

She asked it in exactly the same voice she used for the others. Flat. A box on a screen.

My uncle in my father's green chair. Something quiet. You would never want for anything.

"No," I said.

She typed it in and moved on.

I lay on that table in a paper gown, in a clinic my mother used to bring me to for ear infections, and I understood something I had not understood the night before.

I had not signed up for a job.

I had signed up to become property, and property gets counted before it gets bought. That is what this was. The counting.

Here is the part I never told Junie.

I did not hate it as much as I should have.

Because every number that woman typed into her tablet belonged to me. Not to Gideon. Not to the estate. Mine. Written down in a file that would travel three hundred miles to a man who had never seen my face and would have to decide, off that file alone, whether to put his entire bloodline inside my body.

For two years I had been something my uncle was quietly spending.

That morning I was something being priced.

God help me, I would take priced.

Junie was waiting on the low wall outside with two coffees and the face of a girl who had been rehearsing a speech for four hours.

"Well?"

"They took eleven vials of my blood and asked me how many men I've slept with."

"Naima."

"Don't." I took the coffee. "If you say one kind thing to me right now I will come apart on this wall, and I still have to drive home and make dinner."

She shut her mouth. Then she put her head on my shoulder, which was worse, and we sat there while the wind came up the hill.

"Delphine Castellane's in it," I said.

Junie sat straight up. "Delphine? She has a horse with two names. Why would she ever."

"Politics." I drank some coffee. "Apparently there are two reasons to want this contract and mine is the embarrassing one."

"Yours is the human one."

"Same thing, in Silver Ridge."

Behind us the clinic doors opened. Luna Margarethe came down the steps with a folder under her arm, looking across the parking lot until she found me.

"Miss Vale. A moment."

Junie's hand tightened on my knee. I stood up.

"The files go to Silver Ridge tonight," Luna Margarethe said. "Yours is complete. There's one more item, and I would rather ask you myself than let somebody in that east wing tell you it's mandatory." She opened the folder. "A second photograph. Seated. Full length. No flash."

"They took one this morning."

"They took a record photograph. This is different."

"Different how?"

She was quiet a moment. Luna Margarethe chooses her words in a way that lets you watch her choosing them.

"The record photographs go into the medical file," she said. "This one is sent separately."

"To the Alpha?"

"No." She closed the folder. "Alpha Ronan has refused to look at the candidate files. He was very clear about it. No photographs. No background reports. Not even our names in advance. He intends to choose from the interview and nothing else."

The wind pushed the empty coffee cup out of my hand and rolled it across the asphalt. Neither of us went after it.

"Then who is the second photograph for?"

Luna Margarethe held my eyes.

She had delivered bad news many times and found quick ways to do it, and this was the first time since I met her that I watched her have to work at it.

"Sit for the photograph, Naima," she said. "And if you get to Silver Ridge, do not ask that question there."