The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

"Touch one more thing in this house and I will call the Alpha's office." Nobody listened to me. There were three of them, big men in gray coveralls moving through our living room like they owned it. One of them was lifting our bookcase off the wall. Another had his hands on the green armchair my father had reupholstered twice because my mother loved it. The third was crouched by the television stand, uncoiling cables with the calm efficiency of someone doing a job they had done a hundred times before. My mother was on the sofa. She was sitting perfectly straight with her hands pressed flat against her thighs. That was the thing that hit me first, before the men, before the noise. Her posture. Celia Voss never sat that rigidly unless something was wrong in a way she could not see clearly enough to fix. She was legally blind. Without her thick-lensed glasses, faces were fog and furniture was shadow. She had spent fifteen years memorizing the exact position of every object in this house so she could move through it without fear. These men were dismantling that map. "Mom." I crossed to her in four steps. "Mom, look at me." She turned her face toward my voice. Her glasses were on the arm of the sofa, not on her face. I picked them up and pressed them into her hands. She fumbled them onto her nose and found me. "Mara." Her voice came out as a breath. "I didn't know who they were. They just walked in. They had a key." A key. I straightened up and turned around. A man was standing in the hallway. He had been there the whole time, I realized. He was leaning against the wall by the front door in a tan blazer, watching me with a small, patient smile. My Uncle Reginald looked exactly like my father the way a cheap copy looks like the original. Same jaw, same broad forehead. But my father's eyes had been warm. Reginald's eyes always had a quality I could never name, like he was calculating something just behind whatever he said to you. "Mara." He spread his hands in a gesture of reasonableness. "I'm glad you're home. This conversation is overdue." "Get them out of this house," I said. "They'll stop when we've finished talking." He pushed off the wall and walked into the living room. He straightened a framed photo on the side table, a slow, deliberate movement. "Sit down." "I am not sitting down. Who authorized you to enter this house with strangers?" "I did." He tilted his head. "I'm the executor of your father's estate, Mara. I have been for two years. You know this." "You don't have the right to move our belongings." "I have every legal right to manage estate assets." He pulled a folded document from his inside jacket pocket and set it on the coffee table in front of my mother. She couldn't read it without pressing her nose to the page. He knew that. I picked it up. It was a debt notice. The estate owed two hundred and thirty thousand tokens to a holding company called Crane Acquisitions. The notice was dated three months ago. The final resolution date was tomorrow. "What is this?" I said. "We don't owe anyone this money." "Your father's business loans," Reginald said pleasantly. "Accounts that were in arrears when he died. I've been managing the repayment schedule, but the estate has run dry. I've done what I could, Mara. I really have." He had not done what he could. I looked at the numbers again. The account references did not match anything my father had ever shown me. These loans had been taken out in the eight months before his death, a period when Reginald had power of attorney during my father's illness. I had been twenty-one and working nights, taking my mother to her ophthalmology appointments. I had not read every document. I should have read every document. "The house is the last asset," Reginald continued. He settled himself into the armchair, the one the mover had set back down. He crossed his legs. "Crane Acquisitions holds the debt. If the balance is not resolved by tomorrow morning, they will initiate the liquidation and the property reverts to them." My mother made a small sound. I did not look at her. "You spent two years letting this happen," I said. "I spent two years trying to prevent it." He held my gaze steadily. "There may be a way to resolve it." The room felt different suddenly. The movers had stopped moving. They were not looking at us, but they had stopped. "I'm listening," I said, because I had no choice but to listen. Reginald leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "You're twenty-one now. Unmarked. Your father and I were close, Mara. Closer than you knew. I've been watching you grow up into a very capable young woman." He paused. "If you agreed to a private arrangement with me, something discreet, I would personally absorb the debt. The house stays. Your mother is secure. Your brother finishes school." He paused again. "And you would want for nothing." The air in my lungs went somewhere. I heard what he was saying. I heard the shape of it, the private arrangement, the discreet, the watching you grow up. I had been hearing the shape of it for a year and a half in the way he stood too close at family functions and held eye contact too long and touched the small of my back when there was no reason to. I had told myself I was misreading it. I was not misreading it. "You want me to be your mistress," I said. He did not blink. "I want you to be taken care of." The green armchair was two feet from me. I thought about throwing it at him. I thought about it very concretely, the weight of it, the arc of the throw, where it would land. Then I thought about my mother sitting three feet away and what her face would do if I started screaming. "You have until tomorrow morning," Reginald said. His voice had gone quieter, which was worse. "Think carefully. This is a generous offer, Mara. I could have come here with lawyers and nothing else." He stood. He buttoned his jacket. He nodded at the movers, and they filed out the front door ahead of him. At the threshold he turned back. "I'll call you tonight," he said. "Get some rest." The door clicked shut. My mother's hand found my wrist. I looked down. Her knuckles were white. "Mara," she whispered. "What did he mean?" "He meant nothing," I said. "We're going to be fine." I sat down beside her on the sofa and stared at the wall where the bookcase had been. There was a pale rectangle on the paint where it had stood for twelve years. My phone buzzed. It was Sasha. Mandatory pack meeting tonight. All unmarked females. Compulsory attendance. Do NOT skip this one. I read the message twice. Then I looked at the debt notice still in my hand, the signature at the bottom, and the name of the holding company. Crane Acquisitions. I had heard that name before but I could not place it. I took a photo of the document and texted it to Sasha. What do you know about Crane Acquisitions? Her reply came back in under a minute. Matthias Crane's company. He's next in succession if Alpha Damien doesn't produce an heir. Why??? I stared at the name. Then I got up, went to my room, and started getting dressed for the meeting.