BLOODBOUND TO THE ALPHA AND HIS PUPS

The Contract

CHAPTER 2 — The Contract

Wren

My paycheck hit while I was still sprinting for my car.

Direct Deposit: $612.40

I stopped so fast I nearly dropped my keys. That number was wrong — even after everything Denise had ever docked me, I should've been looking at closer to $1100. I stood under the flickering parking lot light and felt something in me, already stretched thin, finally giving in.

I called the bar. Paige picked up on the second ring.

"Mercer's, this is Paige." Bright. Delighted.

"My deposit's wrong. It's almost five hundred short."

"Oh, that." A pause I could hear her enjoying. "My dad docked hours for 'the incident' this afternoon. Disruption to staff morale. Honestly? You're lucky he didn't dock more."

"You kissed my fiancé in the bathroom."

"And you made a scene." Her voice went syrupy — the particular cruelty of someone who'd never once worried where rent was coming from. "Consider it a parting gift that you got paid at all. Good luck with whatever's next, Wren."

The line went dead. Six hundred dollars. Three hours. A brother whose heart was failing faster than anyone had planned for.

I don't remember most of the drive. Only arriving at St. Agnes, the air thick with bleach and cold floor wax, machines humming their sterile little rhythm down every hallway.

My phone rang the second I hit the lobby. St. Agnes Medical — Cardiothoracic Unit.

"Ms. Calloway? This is regarding your sister, Dr. Ivy Calloway. She collapsed during a procedure. We need family here immediately."

I found her in Room 412, smaller than I'd ever seen her — IV taped to a bruised hand, face pale under the buzzing fluorescent tube.

"What were you doing?" My voice cracked the second I reached the bed. "Ivy, you work here, you don't collapse *during* things—"

"I was trying to get looped into the donor registry myself." Her fingers twitched against the sheet. "If I qualified for a direct match, the board would've moved Milo up today. But my own screening flagged an arrhythmia I didn't know I had. They stopped it, but the stress—" She swallowed hard. "How long does he have?"

"Under three hours." I squeezed my eyes shut. "My check got docked. Derek's gone. I don't have the money for the out-of-network team. I've got nothing, Ivy."

"There's still a way." She caught my hand, grip stronger than it should've been for someone that pale. "The private program I consult for. They put out an emergency screening request today — paid, off the books, obscenely well. Sixty thousand dollars, cash, cleared the same day."

I stared at her. "Sixty thousand dollars. For what?"

"A compatibility panel." She said it fast, like she'd rehearsed it, like she needed to get it out before she lost her nerve. "Blood work, tissue sampling, standard intake. The client's private — some kind of fertility program for a family with money I can't even picture. They've already screened and rejected sixteen women this year. The pay's that high *because* almost nobody clears it."

"And if I don't clear it either?"

"You still get paid for the screening itself. That's the arrangement. Show up, get tested, get paid, done." She said it like a fact, not a promise, and something in the careful way she said it made my stomach tighten. "Wren, I tried. My body failed him. Don't let the clock finish this because I couldn't."

"Why you?" I asked. "Why does a program like that even have your number?"

Ivy's eyes slid away from mine for exactly one second. "I consult on their intake side. It's how I know it's real money and not a scam."

It wasn't really an answer. I noticed that even then, I filed it away somewhere I didn't have time to open.

"I need it in writing," I said. "Whatever I sign — if this doesn't work, if I don't 'clear,' Milo still gets his surgery tonight. That's not negotiable."

"They'll have you sign an NDA and an intake consent. I can get you the address in ten minutes." She was already reaching for her phone with the hand that wasn't tethered to the IV. "You'll need to go now. They don't wait."

"Ivy." I caught her wrist. "Tell me this is what it sounds like. A blood test. Nothing else."

She held my eyes for a beat too long before she answered.

"It's a screening, Wren. That's all I know for certain." A pause. "That's all I need you to know right now."

I should have pushed harder. I think some part of me knew that even as I let it go — but Dr. Anwar's voice was still in my ear, *approximately three hours,* and I didn't have the currency of time left to spend on doubting my own sister.

"Send me the address," I said, and stood up.

---

The papers landed in my inbox nine minutes later. Twenty-two pages, dense as concrete, header reading **KADE BLOODLINE HOLDINGS — SCREENING & INTAKE AGREEMENT.** I skimmed it the way you skim anything with a clock running behind it — fast, half-focused, looking for numbers and red flags instead of actually reading.

The candidate agrees to full-panel biological screening at facility discretion.*

Compensation of $60,000 USD payable upon completion of intake, contingent on candidate cooperation with screening protocol.

Client reserves full discretion over screening methodology.

That last line snagged something in me, just for a second — the way "full discretion" sat there doing a lot of quiet, unexplained work. But my thumb was already moving toward the signature field, because down at the bottom of my screen, Milo's surgeon had texted: Standing by. Need confirmation of funding within the hour.

I signed.

Then I got back in my car, and drove toward an address in the hills I'd never heard of, for a screening I didn't fully understand, for money I'd never touched in my life — thinking, the whole way there, about a boy who liked superheroes and asked if they ever got tired.

I was about to find out what "full discretion" meant. I just didn't know it yet.