The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

CHAPTER TWELVE: THE HANDWRITTEN CONTRACT

Vera brought the new contract to my room at two in the afternoon.

She had written all of it herself. I could see that. Twelve pages in the same hard upright hand the whole way through, no two lines quite even, the ink darker where she had pressed. A contract written by a woman who did not want a single other person to have touched the paper.

"Read it," she said. "All of it. I'll wait."

She sat in the chair by the window with her back straight and her hands folded and did not look at me while I read, which was its own kind of courtesy.

I read it the way I had read the first one. Slowly. One finger on the line. The number was the same. The stages were the same. The seventy-two hours were the same, and I read that part twice again and Vera did not ask why.

There was no clause eleven.

Where it had been, page nine ran straight from clause ten to clause twelve, and clause six, the door, the bus ticket, stood clean and whole with nothing tied to it. If Seraphine died before the birth, I still left when the child was weaned. The finish line was back.

I looked up.

"You took the number out," I said. "In the corner. The copy number."

Vera's eyes came to me, and something in them shifted, a small reassessment, the same thing I had seen in her brother across the desk when I said I wanted the money and the door.

"There are two copies of this contract," she said. "This one, which you will sign, and which I will carry. And one other, which Ronan will sign, and which lives in the safe in his study behind a lock only he opens." She stood and came to the desk. "There is no third. There is no file copy, no office copy, nothing for a housekeeper to fetch and nothing for a clerk to misplace. If a third copy of this contract ever appears in this territory, it is a forgery, and you will come to me before you do anything at all. Say it back to me."

"If a third copy appears, it's a forgery, and I come to you first."

"Good."

I signed it. Both pages that needed signing, my name plain and small, Naima Vale, next to the empty line where his would go.

Vera watched me do it. When I set the pen down she did not pick the contract up right away. She looked at my signature for a moment, and then at me, and for the first time since I had walked into her office that morning the fear was not the top thing in her face. Something more tired was.

"He signed his at noon," she said. "Without reading it. He handed it back to me across the desk and said he trusted my draft, and he could not look at it, and he left the room." Her jaw did the family thing. "He would rather trust me blind than read twelve pages that make a woman into a term. He thinks that is the decent version of himself. It is the most like our father he ever gets, and he cannot see it, and I have stopped being able to tell him."

She folded the contract, both copies of the trouble it had cost her, and slid it inside her jacket.

"Four o'clock," she said. "She's expecting you. Behave as though this is the best day of your life." At the door she paused. "You held up this morning. I wasn't sure you would. Most people, you show them a locked room isn't locked and they never sleep again." She looked at me. "You went and found me instead. That's the first useful thing anybody in this house has done in eight months."

She left.

I went down at four.

I had memorized the way. Second floor landing, left, past the tall window with the view of the drive, down the wide dark stair, and along the ground-floor corridor toward the sound of the machine. I was learning the house the way my mother learned ours, by count and by feel, so that if I ever had to move through it fast I would not be lost.

A man was standing outside Seraphine's door.

He was the Beta. I recognized him from the study, the lean one against the wall who had said nothing and opened the door for me when it was over. Up close he was younger than I had thought, maybe thirty, with a still watchful face and the kind of stillness that is not calm but discipline holding calm in place.

"You're the surrogate," he said.

"Naima."

"Cassius." He did not offer his hand. "She's resting. She'll wake for you, she always does, but I'll ask you to keep it short today. Her afternoon was hard."

"Was it hard before I came yesterday, or after?"

I do not know why I asked it. It came out of the morning, out of the camellia, out of a whole day of being handled by careful people, and it landed harder than I meant.

Cassius looked at me properly for the first time.

"After," he said. "But not because of you." He glanced down the corridor both ways, the way I was already learning everyone in this house glanced down corridors, and lowered his voice. "She spent forty minutes this morning trying to convince Vera of something, and Vera said no, and it cost her the whole afternoon to lose that argument." He straightened. "I don't know what it was. She sent me out of the room to have it."

The machine ticked behind the door.

"You've known her a long time," I said.

"Since I was nine and she was fifteen and she stopped three older boys from drowning me in the training pond." He said it flatly, but something moved under the flat. "There is nothing in this territory I would not do for that woman. I want you to understand that before you spend an hour a day alone with her. Whatever she asks of you, whatever she has already asked of you." His eyes held mine. "If it is good for her, I am the best friend you have in this house. If it is not, I am the last thing you'll see coming."

He opened the door for me. The same way he had opened the door in the study. Polite. Final.

"She's waiting," he said.

Seraphine was awake.

She was propped on her pillows with her hair loose again, and the lamps were low, and the moment I came in her whole face opened up in that warm way that I already did not fully trust and already could not help answering.

"There she is," she said. "Sit. Not that chair, he'll be back at six and he can smell where people have been. The other one."

I sat in the other chair.

"You signed," she said. It was not a question.

"An hour ago. Vera's version."

"Good." She reached for the water glass, and this time I moved to help her and she let me, her cold light fingers closing over mine on the glass. "Vera's a better lawyer than the men my husband pays. She writes like she's expecting to be betrayed, which is the only correct way to write anything in this house." She drank. "Tell me about your day."

I thought about the camellia. About Vera's window opening and the small violent drop. About tell no one, not Seraphine.

"Quiet," I said. "I read the contract twice, like you told me."

Seraphine looked at me over the rim of the glass.

She looked at me the way she had looked at me yesterday when she quoted question fourteen, and I understood, with a cold slide down my spine, that she had heard the lie the same way she heard the last one. From three hundred miles, she'd said. She did not need three hundred miles. She needed a room.

She set the glass down.

"Naima," she said gently. "When you lie to me, don't do it with your face still. You went blank just now. Truthful people fidget. Guilty people freeze." A small sad smile. "I taught myself that watching my husband try to hide bad news for eleven years. He freezes too. It's how I always knew."

I said nothing. There was nothing safe to say.

"You don't have to tell me what it is," she said. "I can see it's the kind of thing someone told you to keep. I've spent my whole life asking people to keep things, so I'm not going to be a hypocrite and pull it out of you." She lay back. "But I want you to know that I saw it. Not to trap you. So that you know exactly what I am, before you decide how much of yourself to spend in this room. I am a woman who sees things. It is the only power I have left and I use all of it, every day, on everyone. Including you. Especially you."

The door was behind me. I did not turn around. But the light in the room changed, that weather-shift I had felt yesterday, and Seraphine's face went smooth and easy the way it had before, and I knew he was in the doorway before he spoke.

"You're early," Seraphine said, over my shoulder, delighted. "You said six."

"I finished early." Ronan's voice, flat, close. Closer than yesterday. "Vera says you signed."

He was talking to me.

I turned in the chair to look up at him, and he was standing near enough that I had to tip my head back to find his face, and he was looking down at me with those gray eyes that read a room before his mouth opened, and for one full second neither of us said anything, and the whole warm dim room seemed to hold its breath along with the machine.

"I signed," I said.

"Read it twice?"

"Three times."

Something moved at the corner of his jaw. The same half-second thing from the study, from the note under my door, and this time I was close enough to be sure I had not imagined it, and being sure was worse.

"Good," he said.

And Seraphine, watching both of us from her pillows with her all-seeing eyes, made a small sound that I could not read at all.