Chapter 6

I read the contract twice that night, once for the shape of it and once for the details that mattered.

My guest room sat on the quieter side of the pack house, a fire already lit when Gideon showed me up, a window that looked out over the training yard instead of the border. I appreciated the choice even if I didn’t say so. I spread the folder across the small writing desk, poured myself the tea someone had left cooling on the tray, and got to work the way I always did — methodically, without letting myself skim the parts that mattered most just because I already knew, roughly, what they’d say.

The Conduit Clause sat where it always sat in contracts like this, buried in careful legal language that most humans reading it would assume was metaphor. It wasn’t. The Provider’s biological function permits conception absent an established mate-bond between Provider and Recipient, through direct physical engagement sufficient to open a conception channel, in accordance with recognized pack-law precedent regarding Conduit-lineage fertility. I’d read some version of that sentence a dozen times now, and it still struck me, every time, how strange it must sound to anyone outside pack society — the plain admission that our kind couldn’t simply manufacture a pregnancy the way humans sometimes did, that whatever science existed in the human world for exactly this problem didn’t translate across the bond-line, that the only workaround anyone had ever found was women like me, born with a gift nobody fully understood and everybody needed.

No artificial insemination clause. There never was, in a Conduit contract — the biology simply didn’t allow for it, which was the entire reason my rate sat where it did. A bond, real or manufactured through sustained intimacy, was the only door in. I’d made peace with that fact of my own body a long time ago. It still felt strange, some nights, reading it laid out in a stranger’s legal document like a fact of weather.

The custody clause came next, longer than most, denser — Ashwood’s lawyer had clearly anticipated the political weight riding on this particular heir and drafted accordingly. Child to be recognized as legitimate issue of Alpha Kieran Ashwood and intended mate Selene Thorne upon birth, full parental rights vested in both parties as co-recognized parents under pack law, Provider to retain no custodial claim beyond the terms of the residency period. Standard, on its face. I read it a third time anyway, the way I always did with the clause that mattered most, and found nothing in the language that gave me pause. It was, if anything, more carefully drafted than most of the custody clauses I’d signed in the past — clearly the work of someone who’d thought through every way a contract like this could go sideways later and tried to close the door on each one in advance.

I didn’t find anything to flag. That, on its own, was unusual enough that I sat with the folder closed in my lap for a while afterward, turning the whole meeting over in my head — the efficiency, the precision, the way Kieran Ashwood had anticipated my questions before I’d asked them. Some Alphas hired the best lawyer they could afford and left the details for their broker to sort out later. This one had clearly gone through every line himself.

I signed the review copy the next morning, in the same study, with both Kieran and Selene present — his choice, I gathered, though I hadn’t asked. Selene sat slightly to the side rather than at the desk itself, present but not inserting herself into the business portion of the meeting, and I found myself grateful for the careful line she was drawing around her own place in the room.

“No revisions,” I said, sliding the signed copy across the desk. “It’s the cleanest custody clause I’ve been handed in five years.”

“I had our lawyer draft it three times.” Kieran didn’t look up from his own copy right away, checking my signature against the line with the same methodical care he’d brought to everything else. “I wanted it airtight before you ever saw it.”

“Most people don’t bother with airtight until something’s already gone wrong.”

“I don’t have the luxury of waiting for something to go wrong.” He set the folder down, finally, and looked at me directly — not the assessing pass from yesterday, something steadier now that the paperwork sat settled between us. “This pack can’t afford loose language right now. Not with the Council watching succession as closely as they are. Not with the border what it is.”

I nodded, and then, because it felt like the moment for it — the contract signed, the terms settled, the shape of the next nine months laid out plainly on the desk between the three of us — I said the thing I said at the start of every residency, out loud, partly for them and partly, if I was honest, for myself.

“I want to be clear about how I work, since we’re going to be sharing a household.” I looked between them both, deliberate. “I don’t get attached. Not to the child, not to the family, not to the situation. I’ll carry this pregnancy with the same care I’ve brought to every one before it, I’ll be present for whatever the residency requires, and at the end of it I will hand over a healthy child and walk away clean. That’s not coldness. It’s the entire reason I’m good at this. I need you both to trust that going in, because it makes the next nine months easier for everyone if nobody’s waiting for me to crack.”

Selene’s expression didn’t change much — she’d already heard some version of this from me the day before, in the sitting room, and I got the sense she’d believed me the first time. Kieran, though, studied me for a beat longer than the statement probably warranted, something unreadable moving behind his eyes.

“I appreciate you saying that plainly,” he said finally. “Most people in your position perform something softer for our benefit. I’d rather have the truth.”

“That’s the truth.”

“Good.” He said it the same way he’d said it in our first meeting — clipped, final, a man closing a door he was relieved to have closed. “Then we understand each other.”

“We do.”

Selene rose first, smoothing her skirt, the easy warmth she’d led with yesterday returning now that the formal portion of the morning had passed. “I’ll have someone show you to your permanent quarters this afternoon, if that suits. I thought — since you’ll be here through the winter — you might prefer a room with a better fire than the guest wing offers.”

“That’s kind of you.”

“It’s practical,” she said, though something in her smile suggested it was both. “I’d rather you be comfortable for the next nine months than merely accommodated. We’re going to be living alongside each other, Runa. I’d like that to be easy, where it can be.”

I thanked her, meant it, and watched her leave the study with that same careful, deliberate grace she carried into every room. Kieran remained behind his desk, already turning his attention to a second folder I recognized, even upside down, as border correspondence.

“One more thing,” he said, without looking up, just as I reached the door.

I paused. “Yes?”

“Thank you. For being straightforward about what this is. It’s — “ He stopped, seemed to reconsider the sentence entirely, and settled on something shorter than whatever he’d started to say. “It’s rare. That’s all.”

“I find it usually makes things easier. For everyone.”

“Yes,” he said, and there was something in his voice I couldn’t quite place, gone as quickly as it arrived, the same way that static charge across the desk had come and vanished the day before. “I imagine it does.”

I left the study with the signed contract’s copy tucked under my arm and the strange, unfamiliar sense that I’d just agreed to something considerably larger than the paperwork suggested. I told myself, walking back toward the guest wing to start packing for the move to my permanent quarters, that the feeling was nothing more than the ordinary weight of a nine-month residency finally becoming real.

I’d believed stranger things than that, in five years of doing this. I’d usually been right to believe them.

This was, I would come to understand, the first time I wasn’t.