The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

CHAPTER FIVE: SILVER RIDGE

The road to Silver Ridge took four hours.

I sat in the back seat of the escort vehicle and watched the landscape change from the low, familiar hills of MoonStone to something sharper and older. The trees grew taller. The roads narrowed and then widened again into something more deliberate, as if the territory had been planned by someone who expected things to last. The escort driver had not introduced himself. He had confirmed my name, confirmed the destination, and then turned back to the road and remained there.

I had slept for maybe twenty minutes somewhere in the second hour, the kind of sleep that is not really sleep, just an absence for a short time, and woken with my face against the cold window and a cramp in my left shoulder.

We arrived at the Silver Ridge main complex at just past eleven.

I had expected a house. What I got was a compound. The Alpha residence was a wide, dark stone building set back from a circular drive, three stories high with tall windows and climbing plants that had been carefully maintained rather than simply allowed to grow. The grounds around it were immaculate. Guards at the gate. Guards at the door. Men in dark clothing who watched the vehicle arrive without moving.

Luna Isabelle was waiting on the front steps.

She looked exactly as she had in MoonStone, precise and unhurried. She came down the steps as I climbed out of the vehicle.

"You made good time," she said. "How was the drive?"

"Long."

"How are you feeling?"

I thought about that for a second. "Functional."

She looked at me for a moment. "That's honest." She turned and gestured at the entrance. "I'll show you to your room first. The interview is at two o'clock. You'll have time to eat and change."

I followed her inside.

The interior was colder than I expected. Not cold in temperature, cold in atmosphere. High ceilings, dark wood floors, minimal decoration. The spaces were large and deliberately uncluttered. Everything was expensive in the way that required you to already understand value rather than being told it.

Two maids passed us in the hallway without making eye contact with me.

My room was on the second floor. It was large, larger than any room I had ever slept in. A bed with a dark frame and white bedding. A window overlooking the garden. A wardrobe already stocked with basics that someone had arranged in advance. A small desk with a notepad and pen.

Luna Isabelle opened the wardrobe and showed me where my own things could go. Then she sat on the small chair by the window.

"I'll tell you something before the interview that I couldn't say in MoonStone," she said.

I set my bag on the bed and turned to face her.

"Alpha Damien is not warm," she said. "Not with strangers. Not with people he hasn't chosen to trust. He will look at you as if he's looking for reasons to end the conversation. That is how he is. It isn't cruelty. It's the way he protects himself."

"I know how to handle cold," I said.

"I'm not asking you to handle it," she said. "I'm asking you not to mistake it for rejection before the conversation has started. There's a difference between a man who is cold and a man who is cruel. Damien Ashford is not cruel."

I nodded.

"His sister Nadia will be in the room. Possibly his Beta. You've seen the preliminary materials about the interview format?"

"Yes."

"Then you know what to expect." She stood. "Be straightforward. The other candidates tried to impress him. Damien doesn't want to be impressed. He wants to know that this will be simple." She paused at the door. "And Mara. Whatever your reasons for volunteering, don't lie about them. He will know if you lie."

She left me alone.

I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the room. The ceiling was high. The window showed the garden with its pale roses.

I thought about what Luna Isabelle had said. He will know if you lie.

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 ate most of the soup. I could not manage the bread. My stomach had been closed for business since roughly six this morning.

At one-forty I changed into the dark green dress I had brought. I tied my hair back. I checked my face in the bathroom mirror and decided that I looked like someone who was not going to fall apart in public, which was the best I could reasonably claim.

I was escorted to the study at five to two.

The room was dark wood and tall windows. There were bookshelves on two walls, full and organized. The desk in the center was massive. Three chairs were arranged in a triangle, the two facing the single one.

Nadia Ashford was already seated. She looked like Damien in the photographs, sharp and dark-eyed. She glanced at me as I came in and held the look for slightly longer than was comfortable.

Damien Ashford was standing at the window with his back to the room.

I had been told he was large. The word large did not do the physical reality any service. He was broad through the shoulders in a way that made the window frame look smaller. His posture was the posture of a man who was accustomed to rooms rearranging their atmosphere around him and had stopped noticing.

He did not turn when I entered.

I sat in the single chair. The leather was cold.

Nadia opened a file on her lap. She looked at it and then at me.

"Mara Voss. Twenty-one. Unmarked. MoonStone Pack. No previous pregnancies. Medically cleared, full fertility panel, no genetic concerns."

"That's correct," I said.

"Why did you volunteer?"

I had prepared an answer. I discarded it.

"My uncle is the executor of my father's estate. He has been deliberately running it into debt for two years so that he could arrive at a crisis point and offer to solve it in exchange for something I wasn't going to give him." I kept my voice level. "This contract offered a different exit. I took it."

Nadia was quiet for a moment.

The man at the window still had not turned.

"The financial compensation was the primary motivation," Nadia said.

"Yes."

"Not the alliance. Not pack duty."

"No."

"That's an unusual level of honesty," she said.

"I was told not to lie."

Nadia glanced at the window. Some communication passed between them that I could not read.

He turned.

I had looked at enough photographs online to have constructed a version of him in my mind, and the version was wrong in the way all photographs are wrong about large people. Damien Ashford was severe in his face, strong-jawed, dark-haired, eyes that gray color that reads as darker or lighter depending on the light. He looked like he had not slept recently and had arranged his face into a configuration that made that impossible to use against him.

He crossed the room. He sat in the chair beside Nadia and looked at me.

I held the look.

"You said your uncle wanted something from you," he said. His voice was exactly the way it had been described to me, deep, with a rasp to it that belonged to a man who gave orders in large spaces. "What did he want?"

I had not expected that question.

"Me," I said. "Specifically, the use of me. Whenever he wanted, for as long as he wanted. In exchange for absorbing the debt."

The room was very quiet.

"And this contract is preferable," Damien said.

"This contract has an end date," I said. "And it doesn't require me to belong to anyone permanently."

He was looking at me with the assessment that Luna Isabelle had warned me about. Not hostility. Something more calculating than hostility. As if he were testing the weight of what I said against some internal measure I could not see.

"If I choose you," he said, "you will live in this compound for the duration. You'll follow the compound's rules. You will not leave the territory without authorization. When the child is born, you will go home. There is no discussion, no negotiation, and no extended contact afterward. You understand this."

"I understand."

"There will be no intimacy outside of what the contract requires," he said. "No relationship. No sentiment."

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

Something happened in his face. Not a smile, not exactly. A fractional relaxation of one muscle near his jaw that I noticed and then decided I had probably misread.

He stood.

"I'll give Luna Isabelle my answer by this evening," he said.

He walked back to the window.

The Beta, who I had barely registered until this moment, stepped forward from the wall and opened the door. I stood, nodded to Nadia, and walked out.

In the corridor I stopped moving and pressed my back against the cool wall and breathed.

My phone buzzed. Sasha.

How did it go???

I typed back: Don't know yet. Waiting.

Three dots appeared.

How was he?

I stared at the question.

I thought about the fractional relaxation near his jaw. I thought about the way he had asked what my uncle wanted, in the direct, no-preamble way of someone who had listened to enough evasive answers to stop tolerating them. I thought about his voice.

Cold, I typed back. But not cruel.

I pocketed the phone and stood in the corridor of a house that was not mine, in a territory I did not know, waiting to find out if 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 woman in a white nurse's uniform came out, carrying a tray. She walked in the other direction without looking my way. Beyond the door she had come from, I heard the sound of a machine keeping a steady rhythm.

I knew who was in that room.

I stood very still and listened to the sound of Rose Ashford's medical equipment marking time in the silence.

And somewhere behind that door, while I was waiting to learn my fate, the woman whose life had made mine possible was doing the same thing.