The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: WHAT I DIDN'T SAY

I did not move.

Bartholomew's voice was still in the dark with me. That's how they do it. Don't move, don't speak. I stood with my back finding a counter I could not see and I made myself into furniture, the thing this whole house had been trying to teach me to be for six days, and it turned out I could do it after all when the cost of not doing it was breathing at me from three feet away in the black.

The breathing moved.

Not toward me. Around me. Unhurried, the way you move through a room you know in the dark, and I understood that whoever it was had the one thing I did not, which was the shape of this kitchen memorized. They did not need the lights. I was the only person in that room who was blind.

Then a door I could not see opened and closed, softly, and the breathing was gone, and it was just me and the small ticking sound of the cooling ovens and, on the floor, a slow dragging breath that meant Bartholomew was alive.

The lights came back on.

All at once, the way they had gone. Kitchen and corridor together, as if a hand somewhere had simply decided the demonstration was over.

Bartholomew was on the floor beside his tipped chair. Not bleeding. Not still. Curled on his side with his arm over his head the way you cover up from a blow that has already landed, and when the light hit him he flinched from it and made a sound, and I was on my knees next to him before I decided to move.

"You're all right," I said. "You're all right, I've got you, you're all right." I did not know if any of it was true. I said it the way I had learned to say things to my mother in the dark. "Can you hear me. Squeeze my hand."

He squeezed my hand.

"I'm not hurt," he said, into the floor. His voice was wrecked. "They don't hurt you. That's the thing you have to understand. They never hurt you. They just show you that they could have."

"Who."

"I don't know." He got an arm under himself. I helped him up, slow, back into the chair I set upright, an old man who weighed more than I could manage and made it anyway on shame alone. "That's the truth, girl, before you ask me again. Forty years and I have never once seen a face. That's the whole point. If you saw a face you'd have somebody to accuse. This way there's nothing. Just the lights, and the dark, and after, you're never quite sure it happened."

He looked at his own hands on the table.

"By tomorrow I'll half believe I fell," he said. "That's how it works on you. Give it a week and I'll have talked myself all the way out of it. That's how I've lived forty years in this house. Not by keeping the secret. By being made, over and over, to doubt I ever knew one."

I crouched in front of him so he had to look at me.

"You knew one tonight," I said. "You told me her name was Maren. You told me the clause was forty years old. You told me to run. Whatever they just did to make you doubt it, I heard you. I'm the record now. It happened."

Bartholomew looked at me, and his ruined face did something that undid me, a kind of terrible grateful crumpling, and he put one heavy shaking hand over mine on his knee.

"Then you carry it," he said. "God help you. You carry it, because I'm too old and too broken and I let go of it forty years ago to save my own skin, and it has been the great shame of my life." His hand tightened. "But not tonight. Tonight you go back to your room the way you came, and you lock your door, and you say nothing to anyone, because whoever was in this kitchen wanted you to know they were in this kitchen. They didn't come for me. They let me live so I'd frighten you. I'm the message. You're who it's for."

I did not go back to my room.

I got Bartholomew a glass of water and made him drink it and I stayed until his hands stopped shaking, and then I walked back through the house the way I had come, and the book was still on the seat of the chair in Seraphine's room where I had left it, and the chair beside it was empty.

Ronan was awake. Standing at the window, his back to the room, exactly the way he had been standing the first time I ever saw him. Seraphine slept on, undisturbed, the machine keeping its patient time.

He did not turn around.

"You were gone forty minutes," he said.

"I heard something. I went to see about it."

"And?"

Here is the moment. I have gone back to it more times than any other in that whole year. The window, his back, the sleeping woman, the six things I was already carrying, and now a seventh sitting hot in my chest, a name and a clause and an old man on a kitchen floor and a warning delivered in the dark.

I could have told him. Every reason I had built for keeping the other secrets fell apart against this one. This was not Seraphine's mercy to protect or Vera's contract to guard. This was someone reaching into his house in the dark and knocking down his oldest servant to frighten the mother of his heir. He would want to know. He had a right to know. It was his house, his mother's name, his father's clause come back from the dead.

And I stood in that warm room and I heard Vera in my head, from the very first morning. If he finds out, in the state he lives in, he will burn this compound to the ground looking for who did it, and he cannot afford to, because Aurelio Crane is counting votes.

Nine days from the ceremony. Two votes from a challenge. A man asleep in a chair an hour ago because he had not slept properly in eight months.

If I told him, he would tear the house apart, and Aurelio would win, and everyone under this roof would belong to the man who breaks children's arms.

If I did not tell him, I became one more person in his life who had looked him in the face and decided that he could not be trusted with the truth. Exactly what his father's house had done to him. Exactly the thing that ran him. The reason he would rather be blind than see.

I would be doing to him the precise thing that had broken him.

I knew all of that, standing there, in the space between his question and my answer. That is the part I cannot forgive myself for. I did not do it in ignorance.

"A door had come open somewhere," I said. "Banging in the wind. I found it and shut it."

Eighth thing.

Ronan was quiet.

Then he turned around, and looked at me, and I have thought since that he knew. Not the details. But the shape of it, the way Seraphine knew, the freeze instead of the fidget. He had spent his whole life around people choosing their words before they spent them. He would know the sound of it in someone else.

"A door," he said.

"Yes."

He looked at me for a long moment. The gray eyes. The jaw doing its small thing, and this time I could not tell if it was the almost-warmth from the note under my door or something colder, something that had just filed me, quietly, in the long list of people in his life who lied to him gently for his own good.

"You should sleep," he said finally. "You look like something happened to you."

"I'm fine."

"You keep saying that." He crossed the room toward the door, and paused when he drew level with me, close, the weather of him against my side. "In this house," he said, low, not unkind, "everyone is fine. My wife is fine. My sister is fine. The staff are fine. I am told, every single day, by every single person, that everything is fine." He looked down at me. "It is the only word in this house I no longer believe. I'd hoped you might turn out to be someone who used a different one."

And he left.

I stood in the middle of Seraphine's room with the word fine rotting in my mouth and understood that I had just failed the one test he had ever set me, the only thing he had ever actually asked of me, and that he knew I had failed it, and that this was going to matter more than the contract and the ceremony and every clause his father ever wrote.

Behind me, from the bed, without opening her eyes, Seraphine said quietly:

"You should have told him about the kitchen."

I turned around.

She had been awake. I did not know for how long. Her eyes were still closed and there were tears on her face, silver in the lamplight, and she had heard all of it, every lie, and something else too, because her next words were not about Ronan at all.

"Bartholomew is the only one left who was here for Maren," she said. "I have kept him safe in that kitchen for eleven years for exactly one reason." Her eyes opened, and found me, and they were terrified. "If they went for him tonight, then they know I've been protecting him. Which means they know what I am planning. And if they know what I am planning, Naima, then all three of us are already too late."