The Ruthless Alpha’s Surrogate

I came home and found three strange men taking my mother's house apart. One of them had our bookcase off the wall. One had his hands on the green armchair my father reupholstered twice because my mother loved it. The third crouched by the television, winding up cables, calm, like he did this every day of his life. My mother sat on the sofa. She was sitting up too straight. Her hands were flat on her thighs. That is what I saw first. Before the men, before the noise. My mother never sat like that unless something was wrong in a way she could not see well enough to fix. She is legally blind. Without her thick glasses, faces are fog and furniture is shadow. She spent fifteen years learning where every single thing in this house sits so she could walk through her own home without being afraid. These men were taking her map apart, piece by piece. "Mom." I got 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. Someone had walked into her home and she had not even been able to see them well enough to know how many there were. I put the glasses in her hands. She pushed them onto her nose and found me. "Naima." Her voice came out small. "I didn't know who they were. They just walked in. They had a key." A key. I stood up and turned around. A man was leaning on the wall by the front door, hands in his pockets, watching me with a soft, patient little smile. He had been standing there the whole time. He had watched me run to my mother. My Uncle Gideon looks like my father the way a bad copy looks like the real thing. Same jaw. Same wide forehead. My father's eyes were warm. Gideon's eyes always look like he is adding something up behind whatever he is saying to you. "Naima." He opened his hands. Friendly. Reasonable. "I'm glad you're home. We're overdue for this talk." "Get them out of this house." "They'll stop when we've finished." He came off the wall and walked into our living room. He straightened a photo frame on the side table, slow, like a man in his own home. "Sit down." "I'm not sitting down. Who told you that you could bring strangers in here?" "I did." He tipped his head. "I'm the executor of your father's estate. I have been for two years. You know that." "You can't touch our things." "I can manage estate assets." He took a folded paper out of his jacket and set it on the coffee table in front of my mother. She would have to press it against her nose to read a word of it. He knew that. That is why he put it there instead of handing it to me. I picked it up. It was a debt notice. The estate owed two hundred and thirty thousand tokens to a company called Crane Acquisitions. The letter was dated three months ago. The final date to pay was tomorrow. "What is this?" My voice did not sound like mine. "We don't owe anybody this money." "Your father's business loans." Gideon said it pleasantly, the way you would say the time. "They were behind when he died. I've been paying them down, but the estate is empty now. I did what I could, Naima. I really did." He did not do what he could. I read the account numbers again. None of them matched anything my father ever showed me. Every one of those loans was taken out in the last eight months of his life. The eight months when he was too sick to sign his own name, and Gideon signed for him. I was nineteen. I was working nights. I was driving my mother to eye appointments and cooking and helping my brother with his homework at eleven at night, and I did not read every paper my uncle put in front of me. I should have read every paper. "The house is the last thing left." Gideon sat down in the green armchair. The one the mover had just put back. He crossed his legs. "Crane Acquisitions holds the debt. If it isn't paid by tomorrow morning, they take the property." My mother made a sound. Small, like something stepped on. I did not look at her. If I looked at her I was going to break. "You let this happen for two years," I said. "I spent two years trying to stop it." He looked right at me. "There might be a way to fix it." The room changed. The three men had stopped moving. They were not looking at us. They had stopped. They knew what was coming. They had heard it before, in other houses. "I'm listening," I said, because I had nothing else to do. Gideon leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. "You're twenty-one now. Unmarked. Your father and I were close, Naima. Closer than you knew. I've watched you grow into a very capable young woman." He paused. "If you came to a private arrangement with me. Something quiet. Then I would take on the debt myself. The house stays. Your mother is safe. Your brother finishes school." He paused again. "And you would never want for anything." The air went out of me. I understood him. I understood every word. I had understood him for a year and a half. In the way he stood too close at family dinners. In the way he held my eyes three seconds past normal. In his hand on my lower back when there was no reason on earth for his hand to be on my lower back. I told myself I was imagining it. I told myself I was a suspicious, ungrateful girl. I was not imagining it. "You want me to be your mistress," I said. He did not blink. "I want you to be taken care of." My mother was three feet away from me, holding her own hands so they would stop shaking, and she could not see his face. She could not see the way he was looking at me while he said it. The green armchair was close enough to touch. I thought about picking it up. I thought about the weight of it and where it would land and the sound it would make. Then I thought about my mother hearing me scream, and I stood there and did nothing. That is the part I still think about. I stood in my father's house and I did nothing. "You have until tomorrow morning." Gideon's voice went quiet, which was worse than loud. "Think it through. This is a generous offer. I could have come here with lawyers and nothing else." He stood. He buttoned his jacket. He nodded at the movers and they walked out ahead of him. At the door he turned back. "I'll call you tonight," he said. "Get some rest." The door clicked shut. My mother's hand found my wrist. Her knuckles were white. "Naima." She was whispering. "What did he mean?" I looked at the wall where the bookcase had stood for twelve years. There was a pale square on the paint. Cleaner than everything around it. All that time it had been protecting the wall behind it and nobody knew. "Nothing," I said. "He meant nothing. We're going to be fine." It was the first time in my life I ever lied to my mother's face. I sat down beside her and let her hold my wrist and I stared at that clean square on the wall until my eyes burned. My phone buzzed. Junie. Mandatory pack meeting tonight. All unmarked females. You have to be there. Do NOT skip this one. I read it twice. Then I looked back down at the debt notice in my lap, at the signature, at the name of the company. Crane Acquisitions. I knew that name. I could not place it. I took a photo and sent it to her. What do you know about Crane Acquisitions? She answered in under a minute. Aurelio Crane's company. He's next in line for Silver Ridge if Alpha Ronan doesn't produce an heir. Why??? I sat very still in my emptied living room, holding a piece of paper that said a man three hundred miles away had been quietly buying my family for two years. Why? she sent again. I did not answer her. Because my uncle wanted me. That was ugly and small and I could fight it. But somebody far bigger than my uncle had wanted something first, and had spent two years and two hundred and thirty thousand tokens setting a table. And I had just realized I was not the person he invited. I was the meal.