The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

CHAPTER TEN: THE CORRECTED PAGE

I opened it standing up.

I do not know why that mattered to me, but it did. If it was going to be something I could not survive I wanted to be on my feet when it arrived.

Inside was a single sheet of paper, folded once. Not a letter. It was page nine of my contract.

He had taken a page out of my contract and put it under my door at two in the morning, and for one confused second I thought he had somehow been in my room, until I saw the small printed copy number in the corner and understood it was his page. His own copy. The Alpha keeps a copy. Of course the Alpha keeps a copy.

Clause eleven was on it. And clause eleven had a line drawn through it.

One straight line, hard enough to press through to the other side of the paper, the way you cross out a thing you are angry at. And underneath it, in that slanted hand:

This clause should not exist. It will be removed before you sign. If Vera or anyone tells you it is standard, it is not. My father's contracts were full of clauses like this one. I did not read mine carefully enough before it went to MoonStone. I have read it now.

You keep the door. R.

I sat down on the end of the bed with the page in my hand and read it four times, and something happened in my chest that I did not have a name for and did not want one.

You keep the door.

He had found clause eleven the same night I had. He had gone through his own copy of a contract he swore he would sign blind, page by page, and he had found the exact string somebody tied to Seraphine's life, and it had made him angry enough to drive a pen through the paper. And then, instead of telling Vera in the morning, instead of handling it in an office in daylight like a man in charge of everything, he had walked to my door at two in the morning and stood there for twenty seconds deciding whether a stranger deserved to know tonight or could wait until it was convenient.

He decided I could not wait.

That is the part I keep. Not the crossed-out clause. The twenty seconds.

My father's contracts were full of clauses like this one.

I thought about the study, and the way he had said I did not want to look at the candidate files like it was a virtue, like refusing to see me made him clean. I thought about Seraphine in the warm dark saying I lived with your father, I know where that road goes. I thought about a woman erased from every record a pack keeps, a blank in an archive, a name he would not say.

This was that. This was the whole thing that was wrong with him, laid out on one sheet of paper at two in the morning. He would rather be blind than be his father. He thought not-looking was the same as not-harming. And clause eleven had shown him it was not, that a man can look away from a woman completely and still hand a lawyer the pen that traps her, that his father had probably looked away too, all the way to the end.

He was not writing to be kind to me.

He was writing because he had just caught himself becoming the thing he had spent his whole life running from, and crossing out that clause at two in the morning was the only way he could stand to go to sleep.

I understood him then better than I understood him for a long time afterward. It would have been easier if I hadn't.

I put page nine down on the desk next to my own handwritten copy of clause eleven, side by side, his cross-out and my careful copy, two people alone in the same house at the same hour of the night finding the same trap and refusing it in two different languages.

Then I did something I had not planned.

I picked up the pen and the notepad, and under my copy of the clause I wrote back.

I found it too. That's why I didn't sign tonight. I'll sign when it's gone. Thank you for the door. But I need to tell you something and I would rather you heard it from me. I already broke a rule today. I went to her room and I stayed fifty minutes and I'm going back tomorrow at four, because she asked me to, and because I am not going to be one more person in this house who does what is comfortable for everyone and calls it kindness. If that's a problem, tell me now, and I'll stay away. But I won't lie to you about where I am. N.

I read it over.

Half of it was a lie of omission the size of a house. I was not going to Seraphine's room only out of stubborn decency. I was going because Seraphine had chosen me, and hidden a folder under a water glass, and asked me to carry a secret that had his name in it, and I had already said yes to all of it before I understood what I was saying yes to.

But the shape of the note was true. I would not lie to him about where I was. It was the one honest thing I could hand him while holding the other thing behind my back, and I have thought since about how that is exactly the trick Seraphine used on him in the study, the truth folded so neatly around the lie that you cannot find the seam. I had been in that house eleven hours and I had already learned to do it.

I did not slide the note under his door. I did not know which door was his and I was not going to wander a strange Alpha's compound at two in the morning learning. I put it in the desk drawer on top of the contract, where I would give it to him the next time our paths crossed, and I turned off the lamp.

I lay in the dark a long time.

The machine two floors down went on ticking, faint through the bones of the house, marking off Seraphine Blackwood's life in seconds while three people who loved her or needed her or both lay awake at the same hour and did not sleep.

I thought I would not sleep at all.

I was wrong. I went out like a light, all at once, the way you do after the worst days, and I did not dream about my uncle or my mother or clauses or doors.

I dreamed I was standing at the window of Seraphine's room looking down at the white flowers, and someone very large was standing behind me, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him along my back without a single part of us touching, and neither of us said anything, and I was not afraid.

I woke at seven with my heart going and my face hot and understood, lying there in the gray morning light, that the dream was the most dangerous thing that had happened to me since I walked through the gates.

I had come here to be a body and a clause and a bus ticket home.

I had been in Silver Ridge for one night, and I had already dreamed about the warmth of the wrong man's chest.

I got up. I washed my face in cold water until it stopped being hot. I put on ordinary clothes and pinned my hair back tight, the way I wear it when I need to remember who I am and what I came for.

Then I opened the desk drawer to get the note, so I could hand it to the first person who could get it to him.

The note was where I left it.

The contract was not.

The folder was gone. Twelve pages, my careful handwritten copy of clause eleven clipped inside the front cover, all of it, gone out of a locked room in a house full of people who moved through hallways without looking at me.

And sitting on top of the empty drawer, where the folder had been, was a single white camellia, cut fresh, still wet at the stem.