The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

CHAPTER NINE: CLAUSE ELEVEN

I read the contract three times.

The first time I read it the way you read anything you are afraid of, too fast, skidding over the words, looking for the number and nothing else. The number was on page four. Five hundred thousand tokens, paid in four stages. Confirmation of pregnancy. End of first trimester. End of second. Live birth.

Live birth. Two words doing a great deal of quiet work.

I put the folder down and sat on the edge of that enormous bed and breathed until my hands were steady, and then I picked it up and read it again properly, the way my father taught me to read a thing that had lawyers behind it. Slowly. Out loud, under my breath. One finger on the line.

Read the part about the child twice, both of them had said. So I read the part about the child twice.

It was worse read slowly. Not cruel. Precise, which in that house I was learning was a different and colder thing than cruel. When the child was born I would have seventy-two hours. Three days to nurse it, if I wanted, because the medical notes said that was better for the infant. Three days, and then I signed a second document, and then a car came, and then I was a woman who used to be pregnant and now had money.

I read the seventy-two hours part more than twice. I am not going to say how many times.

Then I got to page nine, and clause eleven, and I stopped.

It was shorter than the others. Most of the contract was dense, subclause stacked on subclause, the way you build a wall you don't want anyone climbing. Clause eleven was three sentences with white space around them, and white space in a document like that is not empty. Somebody put it there. Somebody wanted your eye to slide across the clean part and keep going.

In the event that the Luna Seraphine Blackwood is deceased prior to the birth of the child, the terms of departure specified in Clause Six are suspended. Continued residence of the surrogate within Silver Ridge territory shall be determined at the sole discretion of the Alpha. Compensation schedule remains unaffected.

I read it four times.

Suspended.

Clause six was the bus ticket. Clause six was the door. Clause six was the entire reason I had signed up for this instead of my uncle, the finish line I had stood in that community center and told Junie about. The Alpha's contract has an end date.

Clause eleven said the end date had a string on it, and the string was Seraphine's life, and Seraphine was dying faster than the pregnancy would finish.

They had stopped giving her numbers. She told me that herself, four o'clock this afternoon, in that warm dim room. They have stopped giving me numbers, which is how you know it's close.

She was not going to make it to the birth. Anybody who had been in that room for five minutes knew she was not going to make it to the birth.

Which meant clause six, my finish line, the whole clean shape of the thing I had chosen, was already gone. It had been gone before I signed. It had been gone before I walked in the door. Somebody wrote clause eleven weeks ago, knowing the exact order these things would happen in, knowing she would die first, knowing the door would close, knowing I would be standing in a room three hundred miles from my mother with no clause left that let me leave.

Continued residence at the sole discretion of the Alpha.

Not my discretion. His.

I put the folder down on the desk very carefully, the way you set down something you have realized is hot.

Then I did the thing my father would have done. I did not panic and I did not sign. I got a pen and the notepad off the desk and I copied clause eleven out by hand, word for word, because a thing you have written yourself is harder to take back later and swear was never there.

While I was writing it, I understood something that made the pen stop on the page.

Seraphine chose me.

Seraphine read twenty-two files and picked the one woman who was running from a man who wanted to keep her. The one woman who wrote no on question fourteen and lied. The one woman whose whole reason for being here was that this arrangement had a door.

And clause eleven took the door away.

She could not have known what my uncle wanted. Except she did know. She quoted question fourteen to me from memory. She said she picked me because I was running. She built the whole afternoon around the fact that I was a woman desperate to get out from under one man's ownership.

And she was handing me to another one. On paper. In advance.

It's never a gift, Vera had said in the corridor. It's always a weight.

I sat in that quiet room with my own handwriting in front of me and I could not make it come out right. Two things were true and they would not sit down together. Seraphine had given me the kindest hour I had had in two years, and Seraphine had read a clause that trapped me here and picked me anyway, on purpose, because trapped-here was the point.

Either she had not read page nine.

Or she had read page nine more carefully than anyone.

I looked at the clock on the desk. Ten past midnight. Nothing to eat after midnight, the woman at the table had said, a hundred years ago, in another life, when the worst thing in my world was my uncle. I was not hungry. I had not been hungry since six o'clock the previous morning.

I thought about calling Junie.

I got as far as her name on the screen. Then I put the phone down, because Junie would tell me to come home, and there was no home to come to. The house was still Gideon's until the debt was clear, and the debt was not clear until pregnancy was confirmed, and pregnancy was not confirmed until I signed the thing sitting open on the desk to clause eleven.

That was the trap, and it was a beautiful one, and I finally understood why Seraphine had smiled into her water glass when I said I was cheap and wanted the door. She knew there was no door. She had helped write the wall.

I did not sign that night.

I want that on the record, in my own account, the way I put clause eleven in my own hand. I did not sign it that night, even knowing that not signing kept my mother one more day inside my uncle's reach. I sat with it until almost two in the morning, and then I closed the folder and put it in the desk drawer and got into a bed too big for one person and lay in the dark memorizing the room the way my mother taught me, so that if I had to move through it fast and blind I would know where everything was.

Window. Desk. Wardrobe. Door.

I was almost asleep when I heard it.

Footsteps in the corridor. Slow. Heavy. Not the light quick step of a maid, not the brisk one of Vera. Something large, moving carefully, the way a big man moves when he is trying not to wake a house.

They stopped outside my door.

I lay completely still with my eyes open in the dark and listened to somebody stand on the other side of my door and not knock.

Ten seconds. Twenty. Long enough that it stopped being a pause and became a decision, a man standing in a hallway at two in the morning deciding something with my door in front of him.

Then a floorboard creaked, once, as the weight lifted off it.

And an envelope slid under the door, pale in the dark, and stopped against the leg of the desk.

The footsteps went away.

I did not move for a long time. Then I got up, and crossed the memorized room in the dark, window desk wardrobe door, and picked it up off the floor.

My name was on the front. Not typed. Handwritten, in a hard slanted hand I had not seen before and somehow already knew was his.

I turned on the desk lamp.

And I stood there in the middle of the night in a house that was not mine, holding an envelope from a man who had told me eight hours ago never to come near the room I had just come from, afraid to open it and completely unable to put it down.