BLOODBOUND TO THE ALPHA AND HIS PUPS

Paid in full

CHAPTER 4 — Paid In Full

Wren

I woke to a blood pressure cuff tightening around my arm and a nurse writing numbers on a chart like nothing unusual had happened in that room at all.

"You're stable," she said, not quite looking at me. "A little sore, that's normal. You can dress when you're ready."

Sore wasn't the word. There was an ache low in my abdomen I didn't have a category for, and a strange, static kind of exhaustion sitting behind my eyes, like I ran somewhere in my sleep. I told myself it was sedation. I told myself a lot of things in that room.

The door opened, and every instinct I had left at once before I even registered who it was.

Rhys.

The second he crossed the threshold, heat rolled through me — sudden, physical, starting low in my chest and spreading up through my throat like I'd swallowed something lit. My skin prickled. My pulse did something erratic and embarrassing, and I actually pressed a hand flat against my sternum like I could hold it still by force.

He stopped in the doorway. Just stopped — one step in, tablet forgotten at his side — and for a second his jaw went tight in a way that had nothing to do with schedules or protocol.

I watched it happen to him too.

His breath caught, just slightly, just enough that I noticed. Something crossed his face — not the flat, filed-away control from the exam room. Something closer to alarm. Like his own body had done something without asking him first, and he didn't appreciate the lapse.

"Is something wrong?" the nurse asked, glancing between us, oblivious.

"No." His voice came out rougher than it had any business being. He cleared it, and when he spoke again it was flat and precise, stitched back into place. "I came to confirm the discharge timing. Nothing else."

"You could've sent someone for that," I said, my own voice not quite steady either.

"I could have." He didn't explain why he hadn't. He looked at me a beat too long — long enough that the nurse actually glanced up from her chart — before he turned, sharp, and walked back out without another word.

The heat drained out of me the second the door shut, leaving something almost like withdrawal in its place. I sat there in a hospital gown that wasn't mine, in a house that wasn't a hospital, trying to explain to myself what had just happened, and coming up with nothing that made sense.

“Adrenaline,” I told myself. “You almost lost your brother today. Your body doesn't know what to do with itself.”

I believed it. Mostly.

---

Whitlock drove me back himself — an older man in a suit as precise as Rhys's, though there was something gentler underneath him, some tiredness he didn't bother hiding from a stranger he'd probably never see again.

"You did well today," he said, once we'd cleared the gates. "Better than most, if it's any comfort."

"It isn't, really." I watched the estate shrink in the side mirror. "Nobody's told me what 'well' means in this context."

"No," he agreed, quietly. "I imagine they haven't."

We drove for a while without talking. I watched dark hills roll by and thought about the ache low in my body, about the way Rhys's face had cracked for half a second before he put it back together, about heat that had no business existing between two strangers who'd exchanged maybe forty words.

"Can I ask you something?" I said finally.

"You can ask."

"The screening. Was it just blood work, or—" I stopped, not sure how to finish the sentence, not sure what I was even asking for. "It felt like more than a blood draw."

Whitlock's hands tightened slightly on the wheel. He was quiet long enough that I thought he wouldn't answer at all.

"There was a blood sample taken, yes," he said finally, carefully, like he was choosing each word off a very short, very dangerous list. "Among other things. The registry requires several data points to confirm compatibility."

"Several data points," I repeated. "That's not an answer, that's a phrase."

"It's the only one I'm able to give you tonight." He glanced at me, and for a second his composed, professional mask slipped, showing something that looked almost like pity. "I'd advise you not to spend too much energy on the details, Ms. Calloway. Take the payment. Take care of your brother. That's what tonight was for."

"That sounds like advice you don't actually believe."

He didn't answer that either. But he didn't disagree.

---

My phone rang twenty minutes later — Milo's surgeon, voice warm with the particular relief of someone delivering good news after a long day.

"He's out of surgery. It went well — better than we hoped, honestly. He's going to need recovery time, but Wren, he's going to be okay."

I turned my face toward the window so Whitlock wouldn't see me cry, though I don't think it would have mattered to him either way. It was the first clean thing I'd felt all day — no math attached to it, no fine print, no strange heat I couldn't explain. Just my brother, alive, on the other side of something that could have taken him.

I let myself have that. Just that, for a few minutes, all the way back into the city.

---

The check cleared before I even got home — the full sixty thousand, sitting in my account like it belonged to someone else's life. I paid the hospital directly, watched the balance zero out in real time, and felt something in my chest finally unclench after four months of holding its breath.

I didn't think about the ache low in my body, or the heat that had rolled through me like a wave, or the flicker of alarm on Rhys Kade's face before he shut it down. I told myself it was over. Screening complete. Candidate seventeen, paid in full, case closed.

I told myself it was over. Screening complete. Candidate seventeen, paid in full, case closed.

I was wrong about almost all of it. I just wouldn't understand how wrong for weeks yet — not until the ache in my body never fully faded, and the strange pull behind my ribs that had started the second Rhys Kade walked into that recovery room refused to let go of me at all.