BLOODBOUND TO THE ALPHA AND HIS PUPS

Candidate Seventeen

CHAPTER 3 — Candidate Seventeen

Wren

The Kade facility didn't look like a clinic. It looked like old money and absolute authority — dark stone, muted gold fixtures, a silence so heavy it felt expensive just to breathe in.

A coordinator met me at the entrance, tablet in hand, and didn't ask my name before she started walking. "You're candidate seventeen," she said, like that was a greeting. "This way."

"Seventeen?"

"This year." She didn't slow down. "The panel's exacting. Most don't clear their intake."

Sixteen women before me. I filed that number away in the same place I'd filed “ full discretion”— somewhere it could sit and bother me later, because right now I had a signature on file and a clock running.

She led me into a private suite, cold enough that goosebumps rose along my arms the second the door shut behind me. A steel case sat open on a side table, and a man in a dark, precisely tailored suit stood over it, adjusting something on the seal with a kind of attention most people reserve for things that could kill them if handled wrong.

He didn't look up.

"Sit," he said. "This takes twelve minutes if you don't fight it."

"Fight what, exactly? Nobody's told me what 'it' is."

That got him to glance at the tablet in the coordinator's hands, not at me. "Compatibility screening. Standard panel." Still not looking up. "You're here because your profile cleared a registry that's rejected sixteen women this year."

"That's not an answer."

That got his eyes on me.

Gray. Assessing. Entirely unbothered, like I was a data point that had briefly failed to format correctly. He was younger than I'd expected for someone who moved a room by walking into it — thirty, maybe thirty-two — and there was nothing warm anywhere in his face.

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

"I'd like to know what I'm agreeing to before you put anything in me."

Something flickered behind his eyes — not offense, more like mild surprise that the seventeenth candidate had opinions. "You signed the intake agreement. Section four covers methodology discretion."

"I skimmed a legal document with three hours on the clock to save my brother's life. That's not the same as understanding it."

For a second I thought he might actually answer me. Instead, he set the tablet down, folded his hands, and studied me the way you'd study a lock you weren't sure was worth the time to pick.

"You're not obligated to proceed," he said. "You can leave. You keep the screening fee regardless, minus processing." A pause, precisely timed. "Most candidates find that offer answers to the question for them."

"I'm not most candidates."

"No," he said again, quieter this time, and something about the way he said it made the room feel smaller. "You're not."

He didn't introduce himself. He didn't need to — the coordinator had already murmured *Mr. Kade* somewhere behind me, low and reverent, like naming him too loudly might summon consequences. He turned back to the case, and that was the end of the conversation as far as he was concerned. Two nurses came in a moment later with the kind of brisk, practiced gentleness that made it clear this was routine to them even if it wasn't to me.

I lay back on the exam table and fixed my eyes on a hairline c***k in the ceiling tile, because it was easier than looking at the man standing a few feet away with his arms folded, treating the woman on the table like a line item he needed closed out before his next meeting.

So I thought about Milo instead. His small hand around my finger. *Do superheroes ever get tired?*

"Beginning intake," one of the nurses murmured. Her attention stayed on Rhys, not me — like she was reporting to him, not to a patient.

This was supposed to be simple. In. Out. Sixty thousand dollars. Milo lives.

There was a pinch, some brief disorientation, a strange pressure I didn't have a word for. It passed. I didn't fight it, because fighting it wasn't in the math I'd already done.

I don't know how long it took. Long enough that when I surfaced again, groggy, the light in the room had shifted, and Rhys was already at the door with the tablet back in his hand, moving like a man returning to his actual life.

"Process the payment," he said, to the coordinator, not to me. "She's done."

Not *Thank you.* Not my name. Just — done, like closing a file he hadn't particularly wanted to open.

I pushed myself upright, head swimming. "That's it? No results, no explanation of what you just—"

"You'll be compensated within the hour." He didn't turn around. "The car will take you back to your vehicle."

"I have questions."

"I'm sure you do." He paused at the threshold, and for one half-second something moved behind that flat gray control — gone before I could name it. "You'll find most of them aren't mine to answer."

Then the door shut, and I was alone with two nurses who wouldn't quite meet my eyes and a check that hadn't cleared yet for a screening I still didn't understand.

I told myself it didn't matter. I told myself sixty thousand dollars didn't need to make sense, that a man like that didn't owe me a conversation, that Milo was in an operating room right now because I'd let a stranger call me *done* like I was inventory.

I believed it, mostly, the whole drive home.

I didn't know yet how much of that hour I'd spend thinking about later — replaying it, turning it over, looking for the piece I'd missed. I just knew that somewhere behind me, in a cold room in a house built like a fortress, a man who hadn't bothered to learn my name had already moved on to whatever came after candidate seventeen.