The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

CHAPTER FOUR: MY FATHER DID THIS

RONAN POV

The hospital wing was cold and white and smelled like medicine and cut flowers, and I hated every hour I spent in it.

I stood at the window and looked down at the garden. Somebody had planted white camellias along the east wall. Seraphine liked them. She told me so from this window three weeks ago, back when she could still stand on her own.

She has not stood at this window since.

"Ronan. Turn around."

My sister's voice. I turned.

Vera sat in the chair by the bed with her back straight and her hands folded. She has been running this pack's business for six months while I refused to leave this room for more than three hours at a stretch. She looked tired the way efficient people look tired. Neatly, and without saying so.

"I turned around."

"Then look at her. Not at me."

I looked at my mate.

She was propped on two pillows with her copper hair loose on her shoulders. Vera made them take out the overhead lights and bring in lamps, because overhead light made Seraphine's skin look worse than it was. I agreed to it. Agreeing was the only useful thing left for me to do.

She was thin now in a way that still reached into my chest and squeezed.

A year ago she trained with our warriors. Eight months ago she baked bread in our kitchen and threw flour at me for being grim. Three months ago she stopped eating solid food unless somebody reminded her.

She was watching me with those dark green eyes and wearing the face she wears when she has already decided something and is waiting for me to catch up.

"You've decided," I said.

"I decided months ago." Her voice was soft. Her words were not. The sickness has taken almost everything and it has not touched her mind. "I'm telling you now because you've run out of time to keep avoiding it."

I left the window and sat in the chair on the other side of her bed. The cushion holds the shape of me now.

"There has to be another way."

"There isn't," Vera said. "We looked. Eight months, Ronan. There is no legal path that satisfies the succession law and keeps the Council off you before winter."

"The Council can wait."

"Aurelio has seventeen votes." She said it flat, the way you say a thing you have already said nine times. "He needs nineteen to call a challenge. He has been working the last two for three months. Without an heir on record, he will have them by the winter session."

I looked at the floor.

Aurelio Crane. His name tastes like rust in my mouth.

He has been moving since my father died. Carefully. Building alliances. Smiling in council chambers with the polite face of a loyal man while he digs the ground out from under my feet.

I have known him since we were nine years old and he broke a smaller boy's arm at training and told the instructors the boy fell.

He is the most patient man I have ever met, and he has been waiting his whole life for exactly this.

A throne with no heir is an argument Aurelio wins.

"I understand the politics," I said. "What I don't understand is how a man is supposed to do this."

Seraphine's hand came 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 in this house who carries both of us forward. That matters to me. More than you know."

"You are not going anywhere." My voice came out rough.

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

"Doctors are wrong all the time."

"They're right this time." She held my eyes and would not let me look away. "The surrogate comes from Luna Margarethe's pack. There are volunteers. The woman will be checked. And I'll sign the release in front of witnesses. Every claim I have on you, on paper, in front of the whole Council. Nobody will be able to call the child illegitimate."

"I'm not signing that."

"You will."

"Seraphine."

"You will, because if you don't, Aurelio Crane sits in your father's chair by spring." Her thumb moved once across my knuckles. "It's a piece of paper, Ronan. It doesn't take anything from me that I still have."

I looked at her hand inside mine. She has fine bones. Her mother used to say she was built for speed, not weight.

She was quick, once. She was so quick.

"I don't want to see the files," I said.

Vera made a sharp sound. "Ronan."

"No photographs. No background reports. Luna Margarethe handles the screening. If the medical results are clean, I do one interview and I choose on the interview. Nothing else."

"That is a terrible way to do this."

"Then I apologize for my terrible way."

"You are making this harder than it has to be, and you're doing it on purpose."

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

Vera pressed her lips together and let the silence sit there.

Seraphine turned her head on the pillow toward me.

"What is it really?" she said. "What's the part you can't say?"

I was quiet a long time. Outside the window the camellia leaves moved in the wind.

"My father did this," I said.

The room changed. I felt it change.

Vera's hands came apart in her lap. Seraphine's thumb stopped moving on the back of my hand.

"His first mate was sick," I said. "He found a woman."

"Ronan."

"And when it was over, she was—"

"Ronan." Vera's voice came down like a hand flat on a table.

I looked at my sister.

In thirty years Vera has never interrupted me twice.

She was already smoothing her skirt. She was already reaching for the water jug on the side table that nobody had asked her to reach for.

"The convoy leaves at seven," she said. "That is the entire purpose of this conversation and we're losing the afternoon."

Nobody said anything for four full seconds.

Then Seraphine's thumb started moving again across my knuckles, slow, and when I turned back to her she was watching me with a look I could not read.

I have been reading that woman's face for eleven years.

"Then don't do what he did," she said quietly. "The surrogate isn't a blank space. She's a person who needs something we can give, and we have something she can give. That doesn't have to be monstrous."

"That isn't the same as—"

"Go and do the interview." She closed her eyes. "Choose carefully. And whoever she turns out to be, remember she isn't the enemy."

I stood. I put my mouth on her forehead and held it there. She smelled like the lavender she keeps on the nightstand.

"Three days," I said into her hair.

"Three days," she said.

I straightened up. And I stopped.

The lavender sat in its little glass. Underneath the glass, squared up neat with the edge of the table, was a gray folder.

Silver Ridge gray. Pack issue. The kind that comes out of my sister's office and nowhere else.

Seraphine did not open her eyes.

I looked at it for maybe two seconds. Then Vera was at the door saying my name, and I walked out and let her close it behind me.

"You'll read the files," she said.

"I'll do the interview."

"Ronan."

"I'll do the interview, Vera." I turned to face her. "And whoever she is, she is a contractor. She will be treated decently. She goes home when it's finished. There will be no confusion in this house about what she is here for."

My sister looked at me the way she has looked at me since we were children, deciding whether to push or save the argument for later.

She saved it.

"Seven o'clock," she said. "Don't be late."

She went back into the room and shut the door.

And I stood alone in that white corridor thinking about a gray pack folder sitting on a dying woman's nightstand, three days before a single candidate file was supposed to have left MoonStone at all.