The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

CHAPTER TWO: FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND TOKENS

The community center smelled like floor wax and wet coats.

Junie found me in the parking lot before I got to the doors. Yellow raincoat. The face she makes when she has already picked her side of an argument I have not started yet.

"You look terrible," she said.

"Thank you."

"What happened with Crane Acquisitions? You send me that and then go quiet for three hours?"

"Inside."

The hall was full. Sixty women in folding chairs. Girls who barely looked old enough to be unmarked, and women in their late twenties who had simply never found a mate. Delphine Castellane sat near the front in a cream coat, back straight. The Beta's daughter. She has never worked a day in her life and she wears that fact like jewelry.

Junie pulled me into two seats on the side aisle. "Tell me."

I told her. Quietly. All of it. The movers. The debt. My uncle in my father's chair. What he offered and what he meant.

Her face changed four times. Then she stopped talking, which for Junie means something inside her has broken.

"He stood in your living room," she said.

"Yes."

"In front of your mother."

"She couldn't hear the details."

"Naima." She grabbed both my hands. Hers were cold. "Go to the Alpha's office. Report him. Tonight."

"For what? For a suggestion?" I made myself keep my voice flat. "He'll say I misunderstood. He has papers. He has standing. I have a twenty-one-year-old's word and a house he owns on paper." I let go of her hands. "I need money, Junie. Real money. Enough to buy that debt, put the house in my mother's name, and get us out from under him forever."

She looked at me the way you look at somebody when you already know what they are about to say and you would do anything to stop them saying it.

Luna Margarethe stepped up onto the low platform.

She is the Alpha's liaison here in MoonStone. Tall, silver in her hair, the calm of a woman who has delivered bad news many times and found quick ways to do it.

"Thank you for coming. I'll be brief. Alpha Ronan Blackwood of Silver Ridge has offered MoonStone a formal alliance. As part of it, he is offering a private contract to one unmarked female volunteer."

The room shifted. People started whispering before she finished.

"Alpha Ronan's mate cannot carry a pregnancy. She is very ill. He needs an heir to hold the succession and stop a leadership challenge. He is looking for a surrogate."

The whispers got loud. A girl two rows up laughed and swallowed it.

"The terms." Luna Margarethe held up a printed page. "One year in Silver Ridge, under the Alpha's protection and full legal authority. Conception by natural means. When the child is born, all parental rights go to Alpha Ronan and the surrogate comes home. In return, she receives five hundred thousand tokens, paid in stages, the first when pregnancy is confirmed."

The room came apart.

Five hundred thousand tokens is a life. It is a house paid off and a business started and a whole family put through school. It is the kind of number that makes sixty women do arithmetic at the same time and go very quiet about it.

Junie's mouth was at my ear. "This is insane. Carry a baby for nine months and hand it over. To a man you've never met. In a territory you've never seen."

"I know."

"Silver Ridge wolves are not like us. They're colder. There are stories, Naima."

"I know."

"So you're not thinking about it."

I waited one second too long.

"Naima."

"My uncle is coming to my house tomorrow morning." I kept my eyes on the platform. "If I don't give him the answer he wants, he files the papers and my mother sleeps outside tomorrow night. He drained that estate for two years so he could stand in my living room at exactly this moment and offer to save us in exchange for me." My throat hurt. "This contract is the one thing that takes his power away."

"You would still live with a stranger for a year. You would still have to sleep with him. You would still have to give away your own child."

"Yes."

"Then how is it better?"

I turned and looked at her.

"Because it ends," I said. "One year and I walk out with money and my name still mine. With Gideon there is no ending. Whenever he wants. However he wants. No date, no payment, nothing written down anywhere. He would own me and he would know it every single day." I looked back at the front of the room. "The Alpha's contract has a finish line."

Junie went quiet. I could hear her breathing.

Luna Margarethe kept talking. Medical requirements. Dates. Housing. The room had already moved from shock into counting. I watched Delphine lean toward the woman next to her and whisper something with a smile on her face.

"Screening starts tomorrow morning at eight," Luna Margarethe said. "Alpha Ronan arrives in three days and will do the final interviews himself. Volunteers, come to the table at the back and register."

Junie's hand closed hard on my arm. "Please think about it."

"I've thought about nothing else since I found strangers carrying my mother's furniture out the front door." I stood.

"Sit down. We'll find another way. We'll find something."

"There is nothing else." I stepped past her into the aisle.

She caught my sleeve. "What if he's a monster? What if he treats you like dirt and you're stuck there a year with nobody?"

I stopped. I looked back at her.

"Then I'll live through it," I said. "I'm already living through Gideon. At least Ronan Blackwood signs his name to what he wants from me."

I walked to the back table before my hands could start shaking.

The list had six names on it. I wrote mine at the bottom.

Naima Vale. Age 21. Unmarked.

I clicked the pen shut and handed it back.

The woman at the table read my name. Then she looked up at me and held it. Longer than she had held it for any of the five girls ahead of me in that line. Long enough that the back of my neck went hot.

She took the pen and made a small mark next to my name. One stroke of ink, out in the margin where the column ended.

None of the other five had one.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

She closed the book and turned it face down.

"It means you're done here," she said. "Eight o'clock tomorrow. Nothing to eat after midnight."