The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

CHAPTER SEVEN: QUESTION FOURTEEN

The nurse held the door open and waited for me to walk through it.

I want to say I hesitated. I did not. My legs took me into that room before my head had finished arguing about it, and the door closed behind me with a soft click.

I had built a picture of Seraphine Blackwood on the drive up. Everybody in MoonStone had. A dying woman in a big cold house. Something gray and quiet and half gone already.

The picture was wrong.

She was sitting up against two pillows in a white bed with the lamps turned low, and her copper hair was brushed and loose over one shoulder, and she was looking at me the way you look at somebody you have been expecting for a long time.

Her body was wrecked. I could see that in three seconds. Her wrists. Her collarbones. The way the blanket lay flat where her legs should have made shapes under it.

Her eyes were not wrecked at all.

Her eyes were the most alive thing in that house.

"Close your mouth," she said. "It's not as bad as it looks. It's worse, but I don't want you fainting on the carpet."

I did not know what to do with that.

"Sit down, Naima."

There was a chair beside the bed. The cushion held the shape of somebody who sat in it for hours at a time and left an impression that had not lifted out.

I did not want to sit in his chair.

I sat in it.

"You're taller than I expected," she said.

"You expected something."

"I expected quite a lot." She smiled. It was a real smile, warm all the way through, and it made everything worse. "How is your mother?"

The floor of the room went out from under me.

"What?"

"Your mother. Odessa. The blindness, is it stable or is it moving?"

I sat very still in a dead woman's husband's chair and felt every hair on my arms stand up.

"How do you know my mother's name."

"The same way I know your brother is sixteen and that he is the reason you took nights at the packing plant instead of days." She reached over to the little table by her bed, and her hand was so thin that lifting a glass of water looked like work. She did not lift the glass. She lifted what was underneath it.

A gray folder.

Pack issue. Silver Ridge gray, with a number printed in the corner.

She set it on the blanket, opened it, and turned the top page around so I could see it.

It was me.

Sitting on a stool in the east wing of the MoonStone clinic in yesterday's clothes with my hands in my lap. Full length. No flash. My face doing that thing it does when I am trying to look like nothing is happening to me.

"The second photograph," I said.

"The second photograph."

"They told me it wasn't for the Alpha."

"It wasn't." She closed the folder and laid her hand flat on top of it, and there was something protective in the way she did it, the way you cover a thing that belongs to you. "My husband refused to look at a single file. He was very proud of that. He thinks refusing to look makes a man clean."

She said my husband and something in my chest turned over.

Twenty-two women had sat in that clinic yesterday and let a stranger measure their hips, and every one of us had been thinking about a man. Not one of us had been thinking about her.

I had been in this house for three hours and I had thought about her exactly once, when I heard her machine through my floor.

She had been thinking about me for weeks.

"You chose me," I said.

"Yes."

"He doesn't know."

"He does not know, and he is not going to." She said it gently, and it was still the hardest thing anybody had said to me since my uncle sat down in my father's chair. "That is the first thing I need from you, and I am asking before you have any reason to give it to me. Ronan cannot know that I read those files. Not this year. Possibly not ever."

"Why?"

"Because he would tear the whole arrangement down." Her thumb moved once across the folder. "He has decided that the only way to do this without becoming his father is to know nothing about you. If he finds out I picked you off a page like a woman ordering curtains, he will call it off, Aurelio Crane will have his nineteen votes by the winter session, and every person in this compound will belong to a man who breaks children's arms and lies about it."

She said it in the same warm voice she had asked about my mother in.

"So I lie to him," I said. "From today. For a year."

"You keep something from him. I'm the one who lied."

"That's the same thing."

"It is," she agreed. "I wanted you to say it out loud so we both know what I'm asking."

I looked at her.

I have been managed by experts. My uncle managed me for two years with paperwork and patience. I know what it feels like when somebody is walking me toward a door they have already opened.

This felt like that. It also felt like the first honest conversation I had been part of since my father died, and I could not make those two facts sit down next to each other.

"You're very good at this," I said.

"I was the Luna of this pack for eleven years." Something flickered across her face, there and gone. "Nobody is good at anything by accident."

The machine ticked. Neither of us said anything for a moment.

"I need to ask you something," I said.

"Ask."

"Are you dying?"

I heard how it came out. Flat and rude and straight through the middle of the room.

Seraphine Blackwood laughed.

It was a real laugh, small and cracked and delighted, and it turned into a cough that bent her forward, and I was out of that chair with my hand on her back before I decided to move.

She got her breath. She caught my wrist and held it while she did, and her fingers were cold and light as paper.

"Twenty-two women," she said, when she could talk. "You are the first person in four months to ask me that in this room."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't you dare." She let go of my wrist. "Yes. I'm dying. They have stopped giving me numbers, which is how you know it's close. Sit down."

I sat.

"Everyone in this house has decided that the kind thing is to talk around it," she said. "My husband sits in that chair you're in for eleven hours a day and tells me the doctors are wrong. My sister in law changes the lightbulbs so my skin looks better. They love me very much and they are burying me an inch at a time and calling it hope."

Her voice stayed steady the whole way through.

Mine would not have.

"I would like one person in this compound who says the true thing to my face," she said. "You have the job if you want it."

"That's not what I'm here for."

"No. You're here to have a baby and take five hundred thousand tokens and get on a bus." She tipped her head. "You can do both. I checked."

And that was when I started crying, which I had promised myself I would not do in this house, in front of anyone, for one entire year.

I put my hand over my face and I sat in her husband's chair and I cried in front of a stranger for the first time since I was nine years old.

She did not tell me it was all right. She did not reach for me. She let me do it, the way you let rain happen.

"Why me?" I said, when I could.

She was quiet.

"Twenty-two files," she said. "Every one of those women is healthy. Six are prettier than you. Delphine Castellane's bloodline goes back further than mine does."

"Then why."

"Question fourteen."

I lifted my head.

"On the intake form," she said. "Any history of coercion or assault that would affect your capacity to consent to the terms of this contract." She recited it exactly. She had read it enough times to know it by heart. "You wrote no."

The room got very cold.

"Twenty-one of those women wrote no and it was true," Seraphine said. "You wrote no and it was a lie, and I could see it from three hundred miles away, because a woman who has nothing to hide doesn't answer a question in one word."

I could not get any air.

"You picked me because my uncle—"

"I picked you because you were running," she said. "Every other woman in that folder wanted this. You needed it. I have spent my whole life around people who want things, Naima, and want is cheap. Want walks away when it gets hard." Her hand went back down flat on the folder. "I am giving away my husband and my house and my name to a stranger. I could not give them to somebody who might change her mind in month seven."

"That's a terrible reason."

"It's an honest one."

"You chose me because I was desperate enough to stay."

"I chose you because you were desperate enough to stay," she agreed. "And because of one more thing."

I waited.

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she picked up the gray folder off the blanket, closed it, and slid it back underneath the water glass where nobody would think to look.

"I'll tell you that one when the baby is real," she said. "Not before. If I tell you now you'll get on the bus tonight, and I have watched this pack come apart for eight months and I do not have another candidate."

"That's not fair."

"No," she said. "It isn't. I'm sorry. I've stopped being able to afford fair."

Behind me, the door opened.

I did not turn around. I did not have to. I watched it happen on Seraphine's face instead, and I watched something in her go smooth and easy and warm, so fast that I understood she had been doing it for months.

"There you are," she said, over my shoulder. "I was just meeting the girl."

And Ronan Blackwood said, in a voice with no temperature in it at all:

"Which girl."