The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE RELEASE

They told me about the ceremony on my fourth day.

Vera came for me after breakfast. Not to her office this time. She walked me out of the house entirely, across the immaculate grounds, past the guards who watched us go without moving, to a low stone building at the far edge of the compound that I had taken for a chapel and that turned out to be something older than a chapel and colder.

"This is where it's done," she said, at the door. "I want you to see it empty before you see it full. People make better decisions in empty rooms."

Inside was one long room with a stone floor and high windows and a single wide table at the far end, dark wood, worn pale in a band down the middle where centuries of hands had rested. There was nothing on the walls. There was nothing anywhere. It was a room built to make sure that whatever happened in it, nobody could later claim they had been distracted.

"In three weeks," Vera said, "Seraphine will be carried in here on that side, and you will stand on this side, and the whole Council will fill the rows between, and my sister in law will sign a document that ends her claim on my brother in front of witnesses who cannot afterward pretend they did not see it."

"The release," I said.

"The release."

I walked to the table. I put my hand flat on the worn band down the middle where all the other hands had been.

"Explain it to me," I said. "All of it. Not the comfortable version."

Vera almost smiled.

"A mate bond isn't a spell," she said. "There's no magic in this room and there never was. It's a fact of the body. Two people who are bonded can feel the edges of each other. Not thoughts. Weather. If he's afraid across the compound, she feels a pull. If she's in pain in the night, he wakes." She came to stand across the table from me. "It's why he wakes at three every morning. He can feel her getting worse in his sleep. He can't turn it off. No one can. That's the whole point of a bond, it can't be turned off, it can only be ended."

"And the ceremony ends it."

"The ceremony records the end. The end is a decision Seraphine makes with her own body, and the paper is proof she made it freely, in front of people, not that anyone forced it out of her while she was too sick to refuse." Vera's voice went careful. "That distinction is the entire reason this room exists. A Luna's claim is the most valuable thing in a pack. Men have murdered for it. So when a Luna gives hers up, it happens where sixty people can watch her do it, or Aurelio Crane stands up in council and says my brother smothered his dying wife's claim out of her for politics, and he would not even be entirely wrong to ask the question."

I took my hand off the table.

"Why does it have to happen before the child," I said. "Why not after."

"Because the child has to be conceived clean." Vera said it plainly, but I watched her choose the words. "While the bond stands, Seraphine feels the edges of everything he feels. Everything. If he lies with another woman while his claim on him is still active, Seraphine feels it, two floors away, in her bed, in her body. Not jealousy. The actual event. The bond doesn't know to be kind." Her jaw tightened. "She has asked to be spared that. It is the one thing in this entire arrangement she has asked for herself, and my brother would burn the pack down before he'd deny it to her. So the release comes first. She ends the claim, she stops being able to feel him, and only then does he go to you."

The room was very quiet. High light. Cold stone.

"So she'll feel nothing," I said.

"She'll feel nothing. That's the mercy. That's the whole point of doing it in the right order." Vera looked at me. "She gives up the man she has loved for eleven years, in a public room, in front of the people who watched her be his Luna, and then she lies in her bed and feels absolutely nothing while he does what the contract requires, and she has told everyone that the nothing is what she wants." Her voice did something then, a small c***k, the first I had heard in it. "I have known her since I was eighteen. She is choosing to make herself numb to him with three weeks of her life left, so that the child that replaces her will be born without a stain on it. And she calls it mercy. And she means it."

I did not say anything for a while.

I was thinking about a woman who could see through anyone in a room, who had spent her whole life keeping and reading and folding truth around lies, choosing to blind one of her own senses on purpose. To stop feeling the one person she had spent eleven years feeling. Three weeks before the end.

"Does he understand what she's doing," I said.

"No." Vera turned toward the door. "He thinks she's protecting herself from pain. He thinks the release spares her the worst of it." She stopped with her hand on the cold door. "He does not understand that she is spending the last thing she has, the ability to feel him near her, so that he can lie with a stranger and make a clean heir. If he understood that, he could not go through with it. So no one has told him. Including you. Especially you."

Another secret. Another especially you. I was collecting them now, one a day, each one heavier than the last, each one handed to me so gently I did not feel the weight until I was already carrying it down the road.

"That's three things now," I said. "That I'm keeping from him."

Vera looked back at me.

"Yes," she said. "It is. And you'll keep more before this year is out, and one day the weight of all of them at once is going to knock you flat, and when it does you will come and find me in that office, at whatever hour, and you will not carry it alone in a locked room like you carried the last one." She opened the door. "That's the only promise I can make you in this house. It isn't nothing."

We walked back across the grounds in silence.

At the door of the main house she stopped me.

"There's one more thing about the ceremony, and I'd rather you heard it from me than from a clerk." She looked out at the drive, not at me. "The release requires two signatures. Seraphine ends her claim. And you begin yours."

The morning went cold and still around me.

"Mine," I said.

"You don't become his mate. Don't mistake me. There's no bond made in that room, nothing forms between you, you're a contractor and you stay a contractor." She said it fast, the practiced version, the version everyone in this house had clearly agreed on. "But the child needs a recorded mother with standing, or Aurelio contests the bloodline the day it's born. So you sign as the acknowledged bearer. It's a legal position. It's ink. It ends when the contract ends."

"Then why did you save it for last."

Vera was quiet for a moment.

"Because in eleven hundred years of that room," she said, "the acknowledged bearer and the Alpha have signed the same document, in the same hour, in front of the same Council, exactly once before." She finally looked at me. "It was my mother. The woman who carried Ronan and me. She signed as bearer in that room, and six weeks later there was a camellia on her pillow and no record she had ever existed."

She opened the door to the house.

"So you'll understand," she said, "why I intend to be standing next to you the entire time you hold that pen. And why I have not slept properly since the morning a flower turned up in your drawer."