Chapter 5

Selene led me down a short hallway to a study on the far side of the house — heavier furniture than the sitting room. This desk looked like it had settled more disputes than it had ever hosted quiet conversation, windows facing north toward whatever the border council had been discussing all afternoon. She didn’t come in with me.

“I’ll leave you to it,” she said, and there was something almost apologetic in how quickly she said it, like she already knew what I was about to walk into and wished, briefly, that she could soften it for me the way she’d softened everything else so far. “I’ll see you at dinner, Runa.”

Then the door closed, and I was alone with Alpha Kieran Ashwood for the first time.

He was standing at the window when I came in, which meant my first real look at him was profile only — jaw set hard enough that I clocked tension before I clocked anything else, dark hair a little too long to be tidy, the kind of stillness that read less like calm and more like a held breath he’d been holding so long he’d forgotten it was optional. When he turned, I understood immediately what Selene had meant by armor.

His eyes did one pass over me — quick, assessing, entirely without the lingering heat I’d learned to expect and dismiss from most Alphas meeting me for the first time. If anything, it was the opposite of that. He looked at me the way you’d look at a signature line on a document. Necessary. Not particularly interesting beyond its function.

“Ms. Vance.” He didn’t move to shake my hand, and I appreciated that more than any Alpha’s warmth so far. “Thank you for making the trip.”

“Alpha Ashwood.”

“Kieran’s fine, if we’re going to be sharing a household for nine months.” He said it flatly, like a fact he was conceding rather than an invitation. “Please, sit.”

I took the chair across from his desk, and he sat as well, the whole exchange stripped down to its bare mechanics with a briskness that told me exactly how he intended to run this contract. No sitting-room tea, no careful unhurried honesty. Just the paperwork, as fast as we could get through it.

“I assume Marcus gave you the broad strokes,” he said.

“Heir contract. Residency clause. Your intended can’t carry, your Council’s applying pressure on succession, and your border situation is worse than the preliminary terms let on.” I kept my voice as flat as his. Two could play the efficiency game, and I generally won it. “Anything I’m missing?”

Something flickered across his face — not quite surprise, more like a brief recalibration, the look of a man realizing the person across from him wasn’t going to require careful handling. “Not much. You’re direct.”

“It’s a professional trait. I’d have thought you’d prefer it, given the timeline you’re working with.”

“I do.” He leaned back slightly, and for the first time since I’d walked in, something in his posture loosened by a fraction — not warmth, exactly, but the specific relief of someone who’d braced for a harder conversation and found an easier one instead. “I won’t pretend this is a comfortable arrangement. It isn’t, for anyone involved. But it’s necessary, and I’d rather move through it efficiently than draw it out with sentiment neither of us needs.”

“That works for me.” It did, genuinely — I’d had contracts drag on for weeks longer than they needed to because an Alpha or a Luna wanted to process their feelings about the arrangement out loud, in my direction, as though I were there to manage their grief as well as their biology. Kieran Ashwood, it seemed, wasn’t going to make me do either. “I’ll want the full contract terms in writing before anything moves forward. Not the broker summary. The actual pack-law document.”

“You’ll have it tonight.” He pulled a folder from the edge of his desk, already prepared, already anticipating exactly what I’d ask for before I’d asked it. Efficient, again. I found myself, against my better judgment, slightly impressed. “I’ve had our pack lawyer draft it against the standard Conduit template Marcus provided. If there’s anything nonstandard you need added, we can revise.”

I took the folder and flipped it open on my lap, scanning the first page more out of habit than genuine need — I’d read enough of these to know the shape of a standard clause on sight. Payment terms. Residency requirements. The custody and legitimacy language, which I always read twice regardless of how routine it looked, because that was the clause that mattered most once a child actually existed in the world.

“This looks standard,” I said, closing the folder. “I’ll review it fully tonight and flag anything that needs revision by tomorrow.”

“Understood.” He studied me for a moment, and this time the look lasted half a second longer than strictly necessary — not heat, not quite, but something I couldn’t immediately name, gone again before I could examine it properly. “Selene mentioned you were direct. She didn’t mention you’d be this fast about it.”

“I don’t like wasting anyone’s time. Yours least of all, given what I understand you’re managing right now.”

“What do you understand about what I’m managing?”

There was an edge in the question, faint but real, the first genuine crack in the flat professional surface he’d been holding since I walked in. I filed it away as data rather than provocation — a man whose control ran deep enough that even a mild question about his circumstances registered as intrusion.

“Enough to know I’m not going to ask you about it unless it directly affects my contract,” I said. “I’m not here to be your confidante, Alpha Ashwood. I’m here to do a job you need done. The border, the Council, your engagement — none of that is mine to manage or comment on. I carry the child. That’s the whole of my involvement.”

Something in his shoulders eased at that, visibly, like I’d said exactly the thing he’d been braced against needing to hear and hadn’t quite believed he would. “Good,” he said, and for the first time there was something almost like warmth underneath the word, buried deep enough that I wasn’t sure he’d meant to let it show. “That’s — good. That’s what I need this to be.”

“Then we’re aligned.”

He nodded, and the meeting settled into its actual business after that — logistics, timeline, the practical mechanics of how a residency contract would run day to day. He was precise in a way I respected, methodical, asking the kind of questions that told me he’d actually thought through what having me embedded in his household for nine months would require rather than simply outsourcing the details to a broker and hoping for the best.

At one point, reaching across the desk to point out a line in the residency schedule, his hand passed close enough to mine that I caught, for one unguarded second, the specific warmth of him — not scent exactly, or not only that, something closer to a pull, low and immediate, gone as fast as it arrived. I didn’t examine it. I filed it under adrenaline and new environment and nothing, the way I filed away every small, meaningless static charge that came from working in proximity to an Alpha for the first time. It happened sometimes. It meant nothing. I’d learned that a long time ago, on contracts with men far more deliberately charming than the one currently frowning at a residency calendar as it had personally wronged him.

“That should cover the immediate terms,” Kieran said, closing his own copy of the folder. “I have a border briefing to finish tonight, unfortunately, or I’d walk you through the rest of the compound myself. Gideon can handle it.”

“That’s fine. I don’t need the tour to be personal.”

“No,” he said, and something in the way he said it made me look up at him properly for the first time since that brief static charge across the desk. “I don’t imagine you need much of anything to be personal, Ms. Vance.”

I couldn’t quite tell, standing and gathering the folder under my arm, whether that had been an observation or a warning. I decided, walking out of his study a few minutes later, that it didn’t much matter either way. Whichever it was, it didn’t change anything about what I already knew.

Kieran Ashwood was straightforward — that was my read on the walk back to the guest wing, and I trusted my reads. A man who wanted this arrangement finished as cleanly and quickly as I did, no performance in him, no charm offensive to sit through, nothing that required careful handling beyond basic competence. That was, if anything, a relief. Easy clients made for easy contracts, and easy contracts were exactly the kind I closed out best.

The static across the desk had been nothing — new environment, close quarters, the ordinary charge that came with meeting any Alpha for the first time. It never meant anything by the second week. It hadn’t yet, in five years, and I had no reason to think this would be the exception.

I filed Kieran Ashwood under easy, the same drawer as the last several Alphas I’d worked with, and went back to the guest wing to start reviewing the contract he’d handed me.