The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE CAMELLIA

I did not touch it.

I stood over the open drawer and looked at the white flower lying where twelve pages of my future used to be, and I made myself think instead of feel, because feeling was going to get me on a bus and thinking might get me answers.

Facts. My father used to say start with what you can prove.

Fact one. The door had been locked. I locked it. Two years of locking my own bedroom door had made me a person who does not forget.

Fact two. The contract was gone and the note I had written to Ronan was not. Whoever came in had gone through the drawer, taken the folder, read the top sheet at minimum, and left my note behind. That was a choice. That was somebody deciding my note did not matter and the contract did.

Fact three. The camellia was fresh. Wet at the stem. Cut this morning, from a garden two floors down, behind a wall of guards.

I picked it up then. Held it by the stem. The cut was clean, made with a blade, not snapped off by a hand. Somebody had gone out to that east wall in the early dark with a knife and chosen one flower and carried it up through a house full of locked doors to lay it in my drawer like a signature.

Seraphine's flower. The one she watched from her window. The one Ronan planted along the wall because she liked it.

The kind thing to think was that she had sent it. A welcome. A wink from the woman who hid folders under water glasses and enjoyed knowing more than everyone in the room.

But Seraphine could not stand at her own window without help. Seraphine could not lift a glass without it looking like work. Seraphine had not walked to that garden and cut a flower in the dark, and she had not climbed two floors to a locked room, and she had not carried out twelve pages of contract under an arm that could barely raise a spoon.

Somebody had done it for her. Or somebody had done it and wanted me to think of her.

Those were very different rooms to be standing in, and I did not know which one I was in.

I put the camellia down on the desk. Then I went to find out.

The corridor at seven in the morning was already awake in the quiet efficient way of a house that runs on other people's early rising. A maid with an armload of linens flattened herself against the wall to let me pass and did not look at me. I stopped anyway.

"Excuse me."

She looked at the floor near my feet.

"Someone came into my room last night," I said. "Do you know who cleans this floor? Who has keys?"

"The housekeeper has the keys, miss." Barely above a whisper. Eyes still down.

"And who else?"

A pause. A small one, but I had spent two years learning to hear small pauses.

"I have to take these down," she said, and went, fast, linens and all.

I stood in the hall and understood two more facts. One, she knew something. Two, she was more afraid of telling me than she was of being rude to the Alpha's guest, which meant whatever she was afraid of outranked me badly.

I did not chase her. You do not get anything out of a frightened person by chasing them. My father taught me that too, though he taught it to me by being the frightened person, near the end, when Gideon was already in the house with his papers and my father would go quiet the same way, eyes down, I have to see to something, and I was too young to hear the pause.

I found Vera in a room off the main hall that turned out to be an office, at a desk, at seven in the morning, already dressed and working, with a cup of something dark going cold at her elbow.

"The contract is gone," I said.

She looked up.

I had expected surprise. I got stillness, which in this family I was learning was what they did instead of surprise, and it told me more than a gasp would have.

"Gone how," she said.

"Out of a locked drawer in a locked room. Sometime between two this morning and seven. Whoever took it left this in its place." I put the camellia on her desk, on the papers she was working on, and watched her face while I did it.

Vera looked at the flower for a long moment.

Then she stood up, walked to her office door, and closed it. And when she turned around the brisk administrator was gone and there was a woman underneath it who looked, for the first time since I had met her, actually afraid.

"Sit down," she said. "And keep your voice at this level, exactly this level, until I tell you it's safe."

I sat.

"The camellias mean something in this house," she said quietly. "Ronan planted them for Seraphine. Everyone knows that. It's the kind of soft public thing that gets talked about at the wall and repeated in kitchens. A tender Alpha and his dying Luna and the flowers he grows for her." Her mouth twisted. "There is a second thing they mean, and only three people alive know it, and after this morning I think you had better be the fourth, because someone has decided to use it on you and I would rather you understood the weapon than be cut by it blind."

The house ticked and murmured around us. Somewhere below, faint, the machine.

"When my father took his surrogate," Vera said, "the woman who carried Ronan and me. There was a signal in this house for the people who did the quiet work. The removals. The erasing. When it was time to make a person disappear from the records, from the rooms, from the pack's memory, a white camellia went where they slept." She said it flat, the family way, the way you say a thing you have carried a long time. "It was my father's private joke. He thought it was elegant. A flower for a funeral nobody was allowed to hold."

The cold came up through the floor and into me.

"The woman who carried you," I said.

"Woke one morning to a camellia on her pillow." Vera looked at the flower on her desk like it might move. "Six weeks later there was no record she had ever lived here. I was four. I remember her hands and nothing else. Ronan was six. He remembers more, and it is the thing that runs him, and he does not know that I know the flower's other meaning, and you will not be the one to tell him."

"Then he doesn't know someone put one in my drawer."

"No." Vera's eyes came up to mine and they were very hard. "And if he finds out this morning, 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 and a Alpha who loses control in the last season before a challenge loses the challenge." She sat back down slowly. "Someone in this house just told you that you are already a dead woman in the records. They did it in a language they knew Ronan uses and I understand and you would not. Which means they were not talking to you at all."

"They were talking to you," I said.

"They were telling me they can reach into a locked room on my brother's own floor and take what they like and leave whatever message they choose." Vera picked up the cold cup and drank from it, and I understood the drink was a way to keep her hands from shaking. "And they took your contract, unsigned, which means somewhere in this territory this morning there is a document that puts a MoonStone woman inside Silver Ridge, in the Alpha's own house, that we no longer control and cannot prove the contents of."

I thought about clause eleven. About the string tied to Seraphine's life. About Ronan's line through it that only existed on his own copy now, and my careful handwriting, gone.

"Aurelio," I said.

"I don't know." Vera set the cup down. "That is what frightens me. If it were only Aurelio I would know what we were fighting. But that flower is a family thing, a dead man's private cruelty that three people know." She looked at me. "My father is nine years in the ground. Ronan would never. That leaves me."

The office went very quiet.

"And I did not put it there," Vera said. "So somebody in this house knows a secret that is supposed to have died with my father, and they want me to know they know it, and they used you to say so."

She stood, walked around the desk, and picked the camellia up off her papers. She held it a moment. Then she opened the office window, and dropped it out, and closed the window again, and it was such a small violent thing that it frightened me more than anything she had said.

"You will go to Seraphine at four, the way she asked," Vera said, her back to me, looking out the window at where the flower had fallen. "You will behave as though nothing happened. You will sign a new contract this afternoon that I will draw up myself, by hand, with no clause eleven, and I will keep it on my person day and night." She turned around. "And you will tell no one, not Ronan, not Seraphine, not the loud friend you text, that a camellia was in your room. Do you understand me."

"Seraphine sent me a flower yesterday," I said. "In a manner of speaking. She likes me. What if it was only her, being—"

"Seraphine cannot cut a flower," Vera said. "Seraphine cannot cross a room. And Seraphine, of every person in this house, is the one who would never, ever use that particular flower for a joke." Her jaw did the family thing. "She knows what it means better than I do. She was standing next to my father the first time he used it."