The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

CHAPTER NINETEEN: HIS ROOM

I had seven days and one problem. I did not know where Ronan's room was.

It should have been simple to find out. It was the least simple thing in the house. The maids would not talk to me. Cassius watched me like a man guarding a bridge. And I could not ask Vera to walk me to it, because the whole point was that no one could connect me to that room, so that if I was caught the story was a lost woman in a big house and not a surrogate searching the Alpha's private quarters for a document that could end his claim.

So I did it the way my mother taught me. By count and by feel. By watching where people went.

It took two days.

I learned it from the water. On the second morning I sat in the small dining room with the door open and listened to the house wake up, and I heard a maid carry a jug up the east stair, past the landing, along the corridor over my head, and stop. A door. A pause. The door again. Then her feet coming back lighter, the jug emptied. I counted her steps both ways. I did it again the next morning to be sure. Third door on the east corridor, second floor, the far end, above the small dining room where nobody thought a surrogate was doing anything but eating alone.

The end of the house. Away from Seraphine's wing entirely. He did not sleep near his dying wife. I understood, once I knew it, why. He could not lie in a bed and feel her getting worse two doors down. He had put the length of the house between his body and the bond so that he could sleep at all, and it had not worked, because Vera said he woke at three every morning anyway, and now I knew that too was Maren's inheritance, a son feeling the edges of a dying woman from as far away as his own house would let him go.

On the fourth afternoon, in the dead hour, I went up the east stair.

I had a reason ready if anyone stopped me. I had gotten lost looking for the library. It was thin and everyone would know it was thin, but a thin reason given calmly is worth more than a good reason given afraid, and I had two years of practice giving thin reasons calmly to men in my own living room.

No one stopped me. The corridor was empty. Third door, far end. I put my hand on it.

It was locked.

Of course it was locked. Everything in this house was locked and none of it kept anyone out who mattered, but it kept me out, because I was exactly the person locks were for. I stood with my hand on the cold handle and my heart going and understood that I had walked to the one door in Silver Ridge I could not open, and that the woman who had sent me here knew it was locked, and had sent me anyway, which meant she expected me to find a way, which meant Seraphine had already decided I was the kind of person who found ways.

I hated how much I wanted to prove her right.

I crouched and looked at the lock. Old. Iron. A keyhole you could see daylight through, not one of the newer ones Vera used on the offices. Aldric's lock, probably, forty years old, on Aldric's door, and I thought about my father, who could open a lock like this with a bent pin and a straightened paperclip and a great deal of patience, and who had taught me because he said a girl should never be locked anywhere she did not choose to be, and who had died before he could know how right he was going to turn out to be.

I did not have a pin. I had time, and the memory of his hands, and a hairpin from my own hair.

I got the pin into the lock. I got my ear against the door. I did the thing he taught me, slow, feeling for the give, listening for the fall of the pins, my whole body forgetting the corridor and the ceremony and the seven things I was carrying and narrowing down to one iron lock and my father's voice in my hands.

The lock turned.

It turned, and my breath went out of me, and I put my hand flat on the door to push it open.

"That's a very good trick," Ronan said, behind me.

I did not scream. I am proud of that, still. I turned around slowly, on my knees, with a hairpin in a lock and no thin reason in the world that would survive this, and Ronan Blackwood was standing six feet down the corridor with his arms at his sides and an expression I had never seen on him.

Not anger. That was the thing that frightened me. I could have worked with anger.

Curiosity.

"Where did you learn to do that," he said.

I took the pin out of the lock. Slowly. I stood up, and my legs held, and I made myself look at him, because looking away was the same as confessing and I had nothing left but not confessing.

"My father," I said. It was true, which was the only weapon I had. "He said a girl should never be locked anywhere she didn't choose to be."

"And you chose to be in my room."

"I got lost looking for the library." The thin reason. I gave it calmly. I watched it die in the air between us, exactly as thin as I knew it was.

Ronan looked at me for a long moment.

Then he walked toward me, unhurried, and I made myself hold still while the weather of him came up the corridor, and he stopped close, closer than the study, closer than the note, close enough that I had to tip my head back, and he reached past me and put his hand flat on the door I had just unlocked.

He did not open it. He held it shut, with me between him and it, and looked down at me.

"There is nothing in the library worth picking a lock for," he said quietly. "And you don't get lost. You've spent a week learning this house the way a person learns a house they intend to move through in the dark. I've watched you do it. Counting doors. Timing the maids. You memorize this place like you're expecting to need it blind." His gray eyes moved over my face. "So don't tell me you got lost. Tell me what's in my room that a woman who came here for a bus ticket would risk everything to reach."

The corridor was very quiet.

Everything in me wanted to tell him. This was the second time, and it was worse than the kitchen, because in the kitchen the lie had been easy and this one was standing six inches away asking me directly, and behind his question was the whole broken thing Seraphine had shown me two days ago, a man who did not know his own name, a son sleeping his whole life over the proof of the lie that made him, and I knew where the proof was, and I knew what it would do to him, and he was looking at me with curiosity instead of anger because some part of him had already decided I was worth being curious about, and I was about to lie to that too.

"Seraphine sent me," I said.

His hand, flat on the door, went still.

It was not the whole truth. But it was the largest piece of true I could give him without giving him the thing that would end him, and I had learned by now, in this house, that a large true piece is the best camouflage a lie has.

"She wanted something from your room," I said. "From before. Something of your mother's, she said. She's dying, Ronan. She's been thinking about your mother, about mothers, about what she's leaving you and what your mother left you, and she asked me to find something that belonged to her, because she can't walk and she didn't want to ask you, because she said you'd never let her spend her last strength on the past." I held his eyes. "I should have refused. I didn't, because she was crying, and I've never once been able to tell that woman no. So I came up here to pick a lock like a criminal instead of coming to you like an honest person. And you caught me, and you should. It was wrong."

The truth folded around the lie so tight I could not find the seam myself, and I hated that I was good at this now, and I hated Seraphine a little for teaching me, and I hated the house for making it necessary, and under all of it I hated that it was working, because I could see it working in his face.

Ronan took his hand off the door.

He looked at me for a long moment, and something moved behind his eyes, and I could not tell if it was belief or the decision to let me think he believed.

"My mother," he said. His voice had changed. Something had come into it that I had not heard before, low and careful, the voice of a man touching a bruise he has spent his life not touching. "Seraphine wants something of my mother's."

"Yes."

"I don't have anything of my mother's," he said. "There's nothing. There's no record she existed. I've looked. I looked for years." And then, quietly, in a way that put a c***k straight down the middle of me: "There's nothing of her in that room, Naima. If Seraphine sent you looking for my mother in there, she sent you looking for a woman this family made sure left nothing behind."

He did not know how true he was speaking.

He did not know that the one thing his mother left behind was in that room, under his own bed most likely, forty years old, with her name on it and the proof of everything, and that I was going to have to come back and take it before he ever learned it existed.

"Go back downstairs," he said. He was not angry. He was somewhere far worse than angry, somewhere old and quiet and hurt. "And tell my wife that if she wants to spend her last days thinking about my mother, she can send for me, and I'll sit with her, and we'll grieve a woman neither of us is allowed to remember, together." He turned to go. Then he stopped, without looking back. "And Naima. The next time you want into a locked room in my house, come and ask me. I've spent my whole life being lied to gently by people who love me. I told you already. I'd hoped you were going to be someone who didn't."

He walked away down the corridor.

And I stood outside his unlocked door with a hairpin in my fist, having just done to him, for the third time, the exact thing that had broken him, and knowing I was going to have to come back that night and do it again, worse, in the dark, alone.