The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

CHAPTER EIGHT: WHICH GIRL

"Which girl," Ronan said again.

I stood up out of his chair.

I did it too fast, the way you stand when a teacher walks in, and I hated my body for it before I was even all the way up. Seraphine watched me do it and something moved at the corner of her mouth that was almost a smile and almost a warning.

"The candidate," she said. "Naima. From MoonStone. Luna Margarethe sent word up that the interview ran short, so I asked to meet her."

She lied without a single seam in it. Easy. Warm. The truth folded so neatly inside it that I would not have found the edge if I had not helped her hide it four minutes ago.

Ronan looked at me.

In the study he had looked at me like a document he was deciding whether to sign. This was different. This was a man finding a stranger in the one room in the world he could not stand to have strangers in, and his face did not move at all, and that was how I knew it mattered.

"The interview ended at two twenty," he said.

"And it's nearly three," Seraphine said. "She's been keeping me company. I've been starved for new faces. You bring me the same three every day and two of them cry."

"I don't cry," he said.

"You do a thing with your jaw that costs more."

He did not answer that. He crossed to the other side of the bed, and I watched the temperature of the whole room change as he moved through it, the way the air changes before weather. He put two fingers against the inside of her wrist. Not to be tender. To count.

"Your pulse is up," he said.

"I've been laughing. It's very bad for me, apparently. Everything is."

He did not smile. He held her wrist and looked at the number on the machine and I understood, standing there in the corner I had backed myself into, that this enormous cold man was afraid. Not of Aurelio Crane. Not of the Council. Of the small red number climbing on a screen beside his wife's bed.

Seraphine's love for him was in her voice. His love for her was in his hands.

I should not have been in that room. I have never in my life felt so much like a thief.

"You should rest," he told her.

"I've done nothing but rest for four months. Ask her something."

He went still. "What?"

"You interviewed her for eleven minutes and you're going to hand her a contract off it. Ask her something while she's standing in front of you being a person instead of a file." Seraphine settled back into her pillows. "I'll referee."

"That isn't how I'm doing this."

"I know exactly how you're doing this," she said, and for one second the warmth dropped out of her voice and something older and harder showed underneath it, the eleven-years-a-Luna thing. "You're doing it with your eyes shut so that when it's over you can tell yourself you never really saw her. I lived with your father, Ronan. I know where that road goes."

The room went completely silent. Even the machine seemed to hold still.

He looked at her for a long moment. Whatever passed between them was eleven years deep and I could not read a word of it.

Then he turned to me.

"Why did you write no," he said.

The floor tilted.

For one horrible second I thought he meant question fourteen. I thought Seraphine had somehow handed me to him, that this whole gentle hour had been a trap with two sets of teeth.

Then I understood he was talking about the interview.

"You asked if I understood the terms," I said. "I said yes. You asked if I wanted a relationship. I said no. I don't know which no you mean."

"The relationship."

"Because I don't want one."

"Everyone wants one." He said it flatly, not unkindly, the way you state a fact about weather. "They just price it differently."

"Then I'm cheap," I said. "I want the money and the door. You can keep the rest of it."

I heard it come out of my mouth and wanted it back. You do not talk to an Alpha like that in his own house on your first day. Junie would have put her hand over my mouth. Luna Margarethe had told me to be straight with him, but there is straight and there is stupid and I had just walked past straight without slowing down.

Seraphine made a sound. I looked over.

She was smiling into her water glass, and there were tears standing in her eyes, and I could not tell what they were for.

Ronan did not throw me out.

He looked at me the way he had looked at me across the desk, the weighing look, and this time I understood a little more of what the scale was measuring. He was checking whether I meant it. Not whether it was polite. Whether it was true.

"Good," he said finally. "Then we understand each other."

"We do."

"You'll sign this evening. Vera has the papers. Read all of them. Read the clauses about the child and read them twice, because I will not have you telling me in month eight that you didn't understand what you agreed to." He moved back toward the door, and the weather moved with him. "When it's done, you don't come to this room again. She needs rest and you are not part of what she needs."

"Ronan," Seraphine said.

"She isn't."

"She's the mother of your heir. Let her sit with me sometimes. I'm dying, not fragile. I'll decide who tires me out."

He stopped at the door with his hand on the frame. His back was to both of us. I watched his shoulders, which were the only part of him he did not have full control over, and I saw them drop half an inch.

"Whatever you want," he said.

It was the softest thing I had heard him say, and it was not to me.

He left.

The door shut. The room let its breath out. I realized my hands were fists and made them stop being fists.

"You're going to be a problem," Seraphine said. She said it fondly, wiping under one eye with the side of her thumb. "I'm so glad. I was afraid I'd picked someone quiet."

"He told me not to come back."

"He tells the rain not to fall. Come at four tomorrow, after his warriors' meeting. He's never here at four." She reached over and, with great effort that she tried to hide, touched two fingers to the back of my hand where it rested on the blanket. "Go and read your contract, Naima. Read the part about the child twice, like he said. He was right about that, even if he was wrong about everything else."

I stood.

At the door I stopped, because I had to know, because I am the kind of person who has to know.

"Question fourteen," I said. "You could have told him just now. You had the whole hour. Why didn't you."

Seraphine looked at me across that dim warm room, thin as paper, more alive than anyone in the building.

"Because it's yours," she said. "It stops being yours the second I hand it to a man. I spent eleven years watching this pack take things from women and write them down in ledgers." She lay back. "Not that one. That one you get to keep. Now go."

I went.

Vera was waiting in the corridor with a leather folder under her arm and an expression I could not read, which I was beginning to understand was the Blackwood family's native language.

"You were in there fifty minutes," she said.

"She asked me to stay."

Vera looked at me for a long moment, the same measuring look her brother had, except hers had something running underneath it that his did not. Worry. Not for me.

"She likes you," Vera said. It did not sound like good news the way she said it. "That is going to make this harder for everyone, and it is going to make it hardest for you." She held out the folder. "The papers. There's a desk in your room. Sign nothing until you've read every page."

I took it.

It was heavier than I expected. Twelve pages, maybe more. Somewhere inside it was the exact price of my mother's house and my brother's school and my own next year, written in a language built to be read twice.

"Miss Vale," Vera said, as I turned to go.

I looked back.

"Whatever my sister in law told you in there," she said quietly. "Whatever she asked you to carry for her. She has a way of making it feel like a gift." Her jaw did the family thing, the small tight movement I had watched Ronan make across a desk. "It's never a gift. It's always a weight. She just hands it to you so gently you don't feel how much it weighs until you're already three months down the road with it."

She walked away down the cold hall before I could ask her what she meant.

I stood there holding my contract, thinking about a gray folder hidden under a water glass, and the fifty minutes I had already agreed to keep secret, and I understood that Vera was right.

I could not feel the weight yet.

I could already feel that there was going to be one.