The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: THREE WOMEN

I did not sleep.

I lay in the too-big bed with the door locked and the desk chair wedged under the handle, which would stop no one who could put out every light in the house at once, but which let me pretend I had done something. I watched the window go from black to gray to the thin gold that meant morning, and I made a decision somewhere in the worst of the dark hours.

I was done being handed things gently.

Seven days I had been in Silver Ridge, and in seven days I had collected a folder under a water glass, a crossed-out clause, a stolen contract, a camellia, a public ceremony with my name on it, a dead woman named Maren, and an old man on a kitchen floor. Each one placed in my hands by someone who knew more than I did, at the moment they chose, in the shape they chose.

I was tired of being the last person in every room to understand the room.

So at seven o'clock I went to Vera's office, and I did not knock.

She was at the desk. Dressed, working, the cold cup at her elbow. She looked up when the door opened without a knock and something crossed her face, and I realized she had been expecting me, or someone, for a while.

"Sit down," she said.

"No." I stayed standing. "I've been sitting down and being told things for a week. This morning I talk and you listen." I put both hands flat on her desk. "Last night someone knocked out every light in the back of the house, put Bartholomew on the kitchen floor, and stood three feet from me in the dark to make sure I understood they could. Before that happened, Bartholomew told me the woman before me was named Maren. He told me she read to the dying Luna, exactly like I do. He told me the Luna died before the birth, exactly like Seraphine will. And he told me there was a clause in Maren's contract, forty years ago, that said if the Luna died first the surrogate never went home."

Vera did not move.

"Clause eleven," I said. "The one in mine. The one Ronan crossed out. The one that vanished from my locked drawer. It isn't a lawyer's overreach, Vera. It's your father's. Word for word. Forty years old. Somebody dug up Aldric's clause and put it back in my contract weeks before I ever set foot here, and last night they came into the house to remind me that Maren signed the same paper in the same room and was never seen again." My voice held, barely. "So I am done being managed. You are going to tell me what happened to Maren, and you are going to tell me now, because I am nine days from standing where she stood, and I would like to know how the last woman's story ended before I sign up to repeat it."

The office was very quiet.

Vera stood up. She walked to the door I had left open, closed it, and stood with her hand on it and her back to me for long enough that I thought she was not going to answer at all.

"I was four," she said finally. "You have to understand that everything I know I know the way a four-year-old knows things. In pieces. Wrong sizes." She turned around. "Maren carried us. She was gentle and she was frightened and she read to my father's first wife, who was dying, the same way it's happening again now, yes. The Luna died two months before we were born. And there was a clause. Bartholomew is right about the clause. I did not know it was word for word in yours. That is new information and it frightens me badly."

"What happened to her."

"I don't know." Vera's jaw did the family thing, and I saw how much it cost her to say it. "That is the truth, and it is the thing that has poisoned my whole life. She had us. She stayed, under the clause, at my father's discretion. And for six weeks she was in this house, our mother, feeding us, and I have exactly one memory of her hands. And then one morning there was a white camellia on her pillow, and by the time Ronan and I were old enough to ask questions there was no record she had ever lived, no grave, no name in any book, nothing, and everyone who might have known was gone or silent or Bartholomew, who was too afraid to speak until last night." She looked at me. "I don't know if my father sent her away or sent her under. I have spent forty years not knowing, and being unable to ask, because the only two people who could tell me are a terrified cook and my brother, who was six, and who remembers something he has never once said out loud to me, and I have never made him, because whatever it is, it is the thing that made him."

I sat down then. My legs did it without asking me.

"Then Seraphine knows something you don't," I said. "Last night she told me she's been keeping Bartholomew safe for eleven years for one reason. She said if they went for him, they know what she's planning. She has a plan, Vera. About this. About Maren. She's had it for years."

Vera went very still.

And in that stillness I saw something I had not expected, which was that this was news to her. Vera, who ran the pack, who wrote the contracts by hand, who knew where every body in this house was buried, did not know what her sister-in-law was planning. Seraphine had kept it from her too.

"She protects everyone by keeping them ignorant," Vera said slowly, and there was something raw under it. "Even me. Especially me. She decided a long time ago that the people she loves are safer not knowing what she carries." Her hand closed on the back of her chair. "It is the single most infuriating thing about that woman and I have never once been able to make her stop, because every time I try, she looks at me with those eyes and I understand that she is doing it to keep me alive, and I let her." She looked at me. "She's been doing it to you for a week."

"I know."

"And you came to me anyway. This morning. Without being handed it." Vera studied me. "You're the first person Seraphine has ever brought into this house who won't stay in the shape she puts you in. I don't think she fully understands yet what she's done."

"What has she done."

Vera almost smiled, and it was not a happy thing.

"She's spent eleven years managing three people who love her too much to disobey her," she said. "My brother. Cassius. Me. We would all rather stay ignorant and safe than push her, because pushing a dying woman feels like cruelty, so she's been able to run everything from that bed, alone, unquestioned." She came around the desk and sat on the edge of it, close, and dropped her voice the way everyone in this house dropped their voice. "And then she chose a fourth person. A woman running from a man who tried to own her. A woman who walks toward crying in kitchens. A woman who won't stop asking what happened to Maren." She looked at me. "I don't think she picked you to be her replacement, Naima. I think she picked you to be the one person in this house who would refuse to obey her when it finally mattered. And I don't think even she knows that's what she did."

The morning light came through the office window, clean and cold.

"So here is what we're going to do," I said, "because I am not sitting in a locked room for nine more days waiting to be handed the next thing." I met her eyes. "You, me, and Seraphine. The three of us in one room, with the door shut, and everything on the table. Not her deciding what each of us can survive knowing. All of it. Once. Before that ceremony, not after."

Vera looked at me for a long moment.

"She'll never agree to it," she said.

"She will," I said, "if the person who asks her is the one she can't read. She catches your lies. She caught mine last night. But she looked me in the face yesterday and told me she uses all of it, every day, on everyone, and I think a woman who is that proud of seeing through people has never once been in a room where someone saw through her." I stood up. "I'd like to be the first. Set the room. I'll bring the truth she can't get around."

"Which is what?"

"That her plan already failed," I said. "Last night. They know. Bartholomew on the floor was proof. Whatever she's been building alone in that bed for eleven years, it's over, and she is out of time, and the only way any of it works now is if she stops protecting us and lets us help her." I went to the door. "She loves those three people too much to obey. Let's see if she loves them enough to disobey herself."

I had my hand on the door when Vera spoke.

"Naima."

I looked back.

"When my brother finds out you knew all this," she said quietly, "and said nothing to him. The kitchen. Maren. The clause. All of it, while you sat in his wife's room every afternoon and read to him and let him fall asleep in a chair." Her eyes were not unkind, and that was worse. "It is going to break something in him that I don't think even Seraphine can put back. You understand that. You're not building an alliance this morning. You're building the thing that's going to detonate."

I stood in the doorway with my hand on the frame.

"I know," I said.

And I went to go and corner a dying woman, carrying the one truth she could not see coming, to force open a plan she had guarded for eleven years, knowing that everything I did to save them was also, quietly, the fuse.