The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE MAN IN THE KITCHEN

I left Ronan asleep in the chair.

I should have stayed. A better woman, a more careful one, would have sat back down and gone on turning pages and pretended she had heard nothing. That is what everyone in this house did with things they heard. They folded them up and put them away and went on being furniture.

I had been folding things up for six days and it was making me somebody I did not recognize on the phone at night.

So I put the book down on the seat of the chair, quietly, and I followed the sound.

It took me out of the corridor and toward the back of the house, past the small dining room where I ate alone, into a part of the ground floor I had not been in. The kitchen. It was enormous, all stone and steel, cold at this hour with the ovens down, one light burning over a long scarred worktable at the far end.

A man sat at the table with his head in his hands.

Not Cassius. Older. Sixty, maybe more, in a gray uniform like the maids wore but heavier, an apron folded over the back of his chair. A big man gone soft with age, shoulders shaking, trying to hold it in and losing.

I stopped in the doorway. I did not know his name. I did not know any of their names. That was the whole design of this house, to keep me from knowing anyone's name so that when I left there would be nothing to miss and no one to write down.

"Are you all right," I said.

He came up out of his hands fast, the way a person does when they thought they were alone, and his face when he saw me went through fear and then something worse than fear, a kind of horror, and he was on his feet before I finished the question.

"You shouldn't be back here, miss." He was wiping his face with the heel of his hand, hard, ashamed. "This is staff. You shouldn't be back here."

"I heard someone," I said. "I wasn't going to walk past it."

That stopped him. He looked at me, really looked, the way the maid with the linens had not, and something moved in his wet ruined face that I could not read.

"No," he said slowly. "No, I don't suppose you would. That's the trouble with you, isn't it. That's exactly the trouble." He sat back down heavily. "You're the first one that walks toward things."

The first one.

The kitchen was very quiet. The one light hummed over the table.

"You knew her," I said. "The other one. The woman before."

His head came up.

I do not know how I knew to say it. Something in the first one. Something in the age of him, sixty and soft, old enough to have been here a generation ago, old enough to have been young when a woman walked these halls carrying two children who became Vera and Ronan.

"Cassius said no one talks about her," I said. "Vera said there's no record she ever lived here. But you cried in a kitchen at half past five in the afternoon nine days before the release, and I don't think that's about me. I think you've watched this happen before."

The old man looked at me for a long, long moment.

Then he got up, and went to the kitchen door, and looked out into the dark corridor both ways, the glance I now understood was the native language of this house, and came back and sat down, and lowered his voice until I had to lean in over the scarred table to catch it.

"My name is Bartholomew," he said. "I have cooked in this house for forty-one years. I am the only person still working here who was working here then, and the reason I am still working here is that I learned, forty years ago, to be the kind of man who does not walk toward things." His mouth twisted. "I have been ashamed of that every day of my life. And tonight I heard that you sit with the Luna and read to her and don't lie to her, and it broke something in me that I thought was already all the way broken."

"Tell me about her," I said.

"Her name was Maren." He said it like it cost him. Like the name itself was contraband, forty years hidden, brought out into the light of one kitchen bulb. "She was kind. She was frightened, the way you'd be frightened, coming into a cold house to do a cold thing. And she read to the Luna too. The first Luna. The one who was dying then, the way this one is dying now." He looked at me. "It runs in patterns, this house. You'd think a family this powerful could break a pattern. They can't. They just run it again with new people and pretend it's the first time."

The room went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the dead ovens.

"The first Luna was dying," I said slowly. "And the old Alpha brought in a surrogate. Maren. And Maren carried Vera and Ronan, and read to the dying Luna, and then—"

"And then the Luna died," Bartholomew said. "Two months before the babies came. Same as this one's going to." His hands were flat on the table now, and they were shaking. "And there was a clause in Maren's contract. I heard the men talk about it in this kitchen, forty years ago, over that very table where your elbows are. A clause that said if the Luna died before the birth, the surrogate didn't go home. She stayed. At the Alpha's discretion."

Clause eleven.

The whole floor of the world tilted under me. Clause eleven, that I had found at midnight and copied in my own hand, that Ronan had crossed out in fury on his own copy, that had vanished from a locked drawer with a camellia left in its place.

Not new. Not a modern lawyer's overreach. Forty years old. His father's clause. The exact instrument that had kept Maren from ever leaving, revived word for word and slipped into my contract, weeks before I ever arrived, by someone who had read the old man's papers and knew exactly what that clause had done the first time.

"Somebody put that clause back," I whispered. "In mine. His father's clause. Word for word."

Bartholomew went gray.

"Then run," he said. "God forgive me for not saying it to Maren. Run, girl. If somebody in this house is running the old pattern on purpose, if somebody put Aldric's clause back in a contract forty years after he died, then this was never about the boy's heir at all." He gripped the edge of the table. "It's about finishing what got started. And you're standing exactly where Maren stood, doing exactly what Maren did, nine days before you sign the exact paper she signed, in the exact room."

"What happened to her." My voice did not sound like mine. "After. What actually happened to Maren."

Bartholomew opened his mouth.

And the kitchen light went out.

Not flickered. Went out, all at once, and the corridor light beyond the door with it, the whole back of the house dropping into black between one breath and the next, and in the dark I heard the old man's chair scrape back hard and his voice, no longer a whisper, sharp with an old terror forty years deep:

"Don't move. Whatever you hear, don't move, don't speak, that's how they do it, that's how it always—"

And then a sound I felt more than heard, a heavy soft sound, and the chair went over, and something hit the stone floor, and Bartholomew did not finish the sentence.

I stood frozen in the pitch dark of a kitchen I did not know the shape of, in a house I had spent six days memorizing everywhere but here, and I understood, too late, that I had walked toward the one thing in Silver Ridge that everyone else had learned to walk away from.

Somewhere in the black, very close, someone breathed.