The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE HOUR BEFORE SIX

The three weeks before the ceremony were the strangest of my life, because nothing happened in them and everything did.

I had a routine by the end of the first week. Breakfast alone in the small room off the kitchen. Mornings in the library, which nobody used, reading my way along shelves organized by a mind that liked history and did not like being interrupted. Four o'clock with Seraphine. And in between, hours of a house that did not know what to do with me and had decided the safest thing was to pretend I was furniture.

The maids still would not look at me. I stopped trying to make them. Vera had explained it on the third day, flat, over the cold coffee she never finished. They've seen a surrogate in this house before. Their mothers told them what happened to her. They're not being cruel. They're refusing to get attached to a dead woman.

That was the thing about Silver Ridge I could not get used to. Everyone was kind in the abstract and no one would touch me, because the whole house had already decided how my story ended, and they had decided it a generation ago, and they were only waiting to see whether I understood the ending as well as they did.

I called my mother every night at eight.

I told her the house was beautiful, which was true. I told her the food was good, which was true. I told her I was safe, which was the fourth thing I was now keeping from someone I loved, and it was the heaviest of all of them, because it was the one I most wanted to be true.

"You sound different," she said, on the ninth night.

"Different how."

"Careful," she said. "You sound like your father did at the end. Like you're choosing every word before you spend it."

I looked out my window at the dark garden and the white flowers I could no longer see as only flowers.

"I'm tired, Mom," I said. "That's all."

Fifth thing.

Ronan started being early.

I noticed it in the second week. Seraphine expected him at six. He had come at four the first two afternoons of my visits, and then, after the day he found me in the chair, he had gone back to six, correct and cold, arriving exactly when he said he would.

Then, one afternoon in the second week, he came at half past five.

I was reading to Seraphine. She had asked me to, on the fourth day, because her eyes tired now and she missed books, and I had a low steady voice that she said was easy to follow. So I read to her an hour a day from whatever I had found in the library that morning, and she lay back with her eyes closed and listened, and sometimes she slept, and I kept reading anyway because Vera had told me the sound helped her rest even when she was under.

I was reading when the light changed.

I did not stop. I had learned that much. I kept my eyes on the page and my voice level and I finished the paragraph, and when I looked up he was standing just inside the door, and he had been there long enough to have heard more than one paragraph.

"You're early," I said, before I could think better of it. It was Seraphine's line. I heard myself say it in something close to Seraphine's voice, and so did he, and something crossed his face that I could not read.

"She's asleep," he said.

"She fell asleep four pages ago. I kept reading. Vera says it helps."

"It does." He came into the room, quiet for a man his size, and stood at the foot of the bed looking down at his wife, and I watched his whole face do the thing it only did in this room, the closed door of him opening one inch onto something that hurt to look at directly. "She used to read to me," he said. "When we were first mated. I hated being read to. I have never been able to sit still for it." His mouth moved, not a smile. "She read to me anyway. For eleven years. She said one day I'd need to know how it sounded."

He had not meant to say it. I could tell by the way he stopped, the way a man stops when he hears his own voice give something away in a room he thought was safe.

He looked at me then. Really looked, the weighing look, except there was a question under it this time that had nothing to do with contracts.

"Why are you doing that," he said. "The reading. It's not in the agreement."

"No."

"Then why."

I closed the book on my finger.

"Because she's dying," I said, "and everyone in this house is so busy being gentle with her that they've stopped treating her like a person who's still here. Vera changes the lightbulbs. The doctors talk around her. You sit in that chair eleven hours a day and tell her the doctors are wrong." I kept my voice low, because she was sleeping four feet away. "She told me she wanted one person in this compound who would say the true thing to her face. I can't do much for her. I'm the woman who's replacing her, which is about the worst thing a person can be to someone. But I can read to her and I can not lie to her, and those are the two things nobody else in this house seems able to do."

The room was very quiet. The machine ticked. Seraphine breathed, slow and even, under.

Ronan looked at me for a long moment, and it was the first time since I had come to Silver Ridge that I could not tell at all what was behind his face, and I understood that this was different from the blankness he wore on purpose. This was a man who did not have an expression ready, because I had said something he had not planned for.

"You don't lie to her," he said.

I thought about the folder under the water glass. The camellia. The release. The five things I was keeping from him, three of which were about her, all of which she had asked me to carry, none of which I could say.

"I don't lie to her about the thing that matters," I said. "That she's dying. That it's close. That everyone loves her and it isn't going to save her." My throat did something I did not give it permission to do. "I let her be a dying woman instead of a problem everyone's managing. That's all. It's not kindness. It's the least anyone owes her."

Ronan was silent.

Then he did something that made my heart go sideways in my chest.

He pulled the second chair, my chair, the one that was not his, around a few inches so it faced the bed at the same angle as his own, and he sat down in his, and he said, without looking at me:

"Read the rest."

"She's asleep."

"I know." He leaned back, and closed his eyes, this enormous cold man who had never in his life been able to sit still to be read to, and put his hands flat on the arms of the chair. "Read it anyway. She said one day I'd need to know how it sounded."

I looked at him. At the closed eyes and the flat hands and the jaw that did the small thing when he thought no one could see it, which meant it was doing it now, because he thought his eyes were closed and I could not.

I could.

I opened the book and found my place, and I read to a sleeping woman and the man who loved her, in a low steady voice, in a warm dim room, while a machine counted down the seconds we all had left with her, and I did not think even once about the fact that in nine days I was going to stand in a cold stone room and sign the document that made me the reason he would ever have to be read to by anyone but her.

I did not think about it because I would not let myself.

And I read for forty minutes, until the light outside went gold and then gray, and neither of us said another word, and it was the closest thing to peace I had felt since a man walked into my mother's living room with a key.

That was the danger. That was the whole danger, and I could see it, and I read anyway.

When I finally stopped, and closed the book, and looked over, Ronan Blackwood was asleep in his chair. The cold man. The feared one. Aurelio Crane's nightmare. Asleep, with his head tipped back and his hands open on the arms of the chair, four days from watching his wife give up her claim on him, nine days from taking a stranger to bed to save his pack, three weeks from a funeral.

For one moment the whole thing that was coming was very far away, and there were just two tired people and one sleeping one in a quiet room.

Then, faint, from the corridor, I heard the sound of a door and Cassius's voice, low, saying something to a guard, and behind it, so quiet I almost missed it, another sound.

Somewhere in the house, someone was crying. Not Seraphine. Not a woman.

A man, trying not to be heard, and failing, and it was not coming from this room, because the man in this room was asleep in his chair with his hands open.