Reborn To Ruin The Alpha

The Extra Containers

CHAPTER 3: The Extra Containers

I could not stop thinking about the man in the parking lot.

Three days passed and his face kept surfacing in my mind at random moments. Dark eyes, sharp jaw, the way he looked at me like he was cataloging everything. Not the way men usually looked at me. Not attraction. Analysis.

My wolf was restless about it. She kept pushing forward, straining at the edges of my consciousness, trying to tell me something she could not put into words.

"Who was that?" I asked her.

She paced. She growled. She offered nothing useful.

I shoved the mystery aside and focused on what mattered. The hormone treatments had started, daily injections I administered to myself in the bathroom of my apartment. The drugs made me bloated and irritable, same as the first time. But this time I had a reason to push through it.

The embryo transfer was scheduled for Friday. I had four days to prepare.

I spent those days building my documentation system. A burner phone with an encrypted recording app. A small notebook kept inside a sealed plastic bag in my toilet tank. Digital copies of everything uploaded to a cloud server that only I could access. If something happened to me, if I disappeared like Sandra eventually would, the evidence would survive.

On Wednesday afternoon, my regular phone rang. Unknown number.

"Hello?"

"Evelyn?" A soft voice, barely above a whisper. "It's Tina. From the clinic."

I went still. Tina had never called me in the first trimester…Not once.

"How did you get my number?" I kept my voice casual, leaning against my kitchen counter.

"It's in your file. Look, I only have a minute." Her words came fast, tumbling over each other. "The extra vials from your blood bank. They ran tests that aren't in your chart. Genetic mapping, fertility markers, things that have nothing to do with surrogate screening."

My grip tightened on the phone. "What kind of genetic mapping?"

"The kind that tells them exactly what your offspring would look like. How strong they'd be. Whether they'd present Alpha characteristics." Tina's breathing was shaky. "They do this with every surrogate. They're not just screening you. They're evaluating your genetic material like... like a product."

My stomach turned. I already knew this, but hearing it confirmed in real time was different from remembering it. It made the rage fresh again.

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked.

A long pause. "Because you noticed the extra vials. No one ever notices. And the way you looked at me... you already knew something was wrong, didn't you?"

I chose my next words carefully. "I'm paying attention. That's all."

"Be careful, Evelyn. Please." The line went dead.

I set the phone down and let out a long breath. Tina was further along than I expected. In the first period, she never reached out. Maybe my small comment about the flask had changed something. Pushed her past whatever line she had been hovering at.

Good..I needed her.

Friday morning arrived and I drove to the clinic for the embryo transfer. The procedure itself was quick and clinical. I lay on a table with my feet in stirrups while Sylvia and a doctor I did not recognize performed the transfer. Tina stood off to the side, handing instruments and avoiding my eyes.

"You should know within two weeks if implantation was successful," Sylvia said, peeling off her gloves. "Rest today. Light activity only."

I nodded and dressed myself. On my way out, Tina pressed a small card into my palm. A phone number written in pencil. I slipped it into my pocket without looking at it.

Two weeks later, the test came back positive. Pregnant.

My wolf howled. Not with joy, not with grief. With purpose. We were back in the fire, but this time we chose to walk in.

The clinic scheduled weekly appointments. I showed up to each one on time, played the role of grateful, slightly overwhelmed surrogate. I asked just enough questions to seem invested, but not enough to seem suspicious.

At my six-week appointment, Sandra was in the waiting room again. Her belly was bigger now, stretching the fabric of her sundress. But her smile was thinner.

"Hey girl," she said, patting the seat next to her. "How's it going? Morning sickness hit yet?"

"Like a truck." I sat beside her and noticed the dark circles under her eyes. "You okay? You look tired."

Sandra's smile flickered. "Fine. Just not sleeping great." She leaned closer and dropped her voice. "They changed my appointment times. Used to be mornings, now they're making me come in at night. Some kind of specialized monitoring, they said."

My blood chilled. Night appointments. In the first timeline, Sandra mentioned the same thing about two weeks before she disappeared.

"That's strange," I said carefully. "Did they say why?"

"Something about the baby's sleep cycle and getting better readings." She shrugged, but her hands twisted in her lap. "It's fine. I'm sure it's fine."

It was not fine.

"Sandra." I touched her arm. "If anything feels wrong, you call me. Day or night. Okay?"

She looked at me with those wide blue eyes and nodded slowly. "You're kind of intense for someone I just met a few weeks ago, you know that?"

"I've been told." I gave her my number and squeezed her hand. "I mean it. Anything."

She tucked the paper into her purse and the nurse called her name. I watched her waddle through the door and my chest constricted. In the first timeline, I never tried to help her. I was too wrapped up in my own delusions about Richard to pay attention to anyone else.

Not this time.

My wolf growled her agreement.

After my own appointment, where everything measured perfectly normal at six weeks, I walked to my car in the parking lot. And stopped dead.

A note was tucked under my windshield wiper. Plain white paper, folded once.

I looked around. The parking lot was empty. No cameras pointed at this section, I already knew that from mapping the clinic's security layout.

I unfolded the paper.

Two words. Neat, masculine handwriting.

"I know.”