Chapter 5: The Wheelchair Ruse

JASON’S POV

“I’m not doing this, Grandmother.” I paced the length of her study, hands shoved in my pockets, doing my best to keep my voice level even though every word out of her mouth made that harder.

The study smelled like it always did, old paper and the faint trace of the lavender she kept in a bowl by the window, and some part of me had always found that smell calming. Not tonight. “I don’t want a wife. Being unmarried doesn’t make me any less of an Alpha.”

“No one said it did, Jason.” She sat perfectly composed behind her desk, the way she always did when she’d already decided how a conversation would end before it began. “But this family needs an heir beyond you. I need grandchildren before I’m too old to enjoy them, and this pack needs stability that only comes from a proper mate at your side.”

“So that’s what this is. Grandchildren. That’s all you actually care about.”

“Don’t twist my meaning.” Her tone sharpened, just slightly, enough to remind me exactly whose study I was standing in. “I care about you. That’s precisely why I’ve gone to such lengths to find someone who isn’t after your title.”

“By telling the entire region I’m crippled?” I stopped pacing and stared at her, genuinely searching her face for some explanation that would make that decision sound less insane out loud than it had in my head for the past week. “You let every Alpha in three territories believe I lost the use of my legs. I haven’t. I could outrun half the guards in this compound right now.”

“Exactly.” She folded her hands on the desk, entirely unbothered by my outrage. “Which is precisely the point. Any woman willing to marry a man she believes is disabled, powerless, unable to give her the status she actually wants — that woman isn’t marrying you for your rank, Jason. She’s either desperate, or she’s exactly the kind of person capable of caring about someone for reasons that have nothing to do with what he can offer her.”

“You’ve never gone to this kind of trouble before.” Something in her expression made me pause. My grandmother wasn’t a woman who improvised. Every scheme she’d ever run had come with years of planning behind it. “Why now? Why this elaborate, Grandmother?”

Her hands stilled on the desk. For the first time in the conversation, she didn’t answer immediately.

“Because I’ve already tried something like this once before,” she said finally, “and it went wrong in ways I never anticipated.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Six years ago.” She met my eyes, and something in her expression — guilt, maybe, an emotion I’d rarely seen cross her face in my entire life — made my stomach drop before she’d even finished the sentence. “The hotel. The private suite. The chemical in the air that neither of you could explain.”

The room went very quiet.

“That was you.” My voice came out flatter than I intended, disbelief and fury tangling together somewhere behind my ribs. “You did that to me.”

“I arranged it, yes.” She didn’t flinch, didn’t look away, though her voice had lost its usual iron confidence. “You’d refused every match I brought to you. I was desperate, Jason, and I believed — foolishly, perhaps — that if I could put you in a room with the right chemistry, your wolf would recognize something your stubborn mind refused to consider. I never meant for either of you to be harmed. I only wanted to force a connection I thought you needed.”

“You drugged me.” I could barely get the words out. “You drugged some innocent woman too, someone who had nothing to do with any of this, and you’re only telling me now?”

“I tried to find her afterward.” Her voice cracked, just slightly, the first genuine crack I’d heard in her composure in years. “I had people searching for weeks. A waitress, working a shift she wasn’t even supposed to cover that night — my sources lost her trail within days. No one actual cared about her. She simply vanished, and I finally had to accept that whatever your wolf recognized in that room, I had no way of ever giving you back.”

I stood frozen, unable to decide which fact to be angrier about first.

“So this,” I said slowly, gesturing at the wheelchair waiting by the door, “is your solution. Since your first plan failed, you’re trying again. Different woman, same manipulation.”

“This is the only chance I have left, Jason, and I am not ashamed to admit that.” She rose from her chair, crossing the room to stand in front of me, older and smaller than I usually let myself notice. “I am not getting any younger. I have exactly one grandson, one bloodline, and one dwindling window of time to see it secured before I’m gone. I failed you once already, however well I meant it. I intend to see this through properly, in the open, without chemicals or tricks beyond the wheelchair itself — which harms no one, and simply lets you see a woman’s heart before her ambition.”

…

I sat in the wheelchair an hour later, feeling every bit as ridiculous as I’d expected to, while one of the staff pushed me down the corridor toward the receiving hall. The chair itself was uncomfortable in a way I hadn’t anticipated, my legs itching to stand, my instincts rebelling against the sheer helplessness of being wheeled somewhere instead of walking there myself.

I told myself it didn’t matter. I’d play the part for one evening, watch this woman’s reaction when she believed she was marrying a man who couldn’t walk, and if she flinched, if I saw even a flicker of that particular disappointment I’d learned to recognize instantly after six years of practice, I’d know everything I needed to know before she ever opened her mouth.

I’d met enough of them by now to have the pattern memorized. The ones who smiled too widely when they learned my last name. The ones who asked pointed questions about the pack’s holdings before they’d even learned my favorite color.

Even the ones who seemed kind at first, who laughed at the right moments and asked thoughtful questions and made me wonder, briefly, foolishly, if maybe this one was different — they always, eventually, showed me exactly what they’d really come for.

All my life, I’d only ever encountered gold diggers dressed up in different disguises. Some wore their ambition openly, unashamed of wanting my title more than they wanted me. Others were more patient, more careful, willing to invest weeks or months into convincing me they cared before the mask finally slipped and revealed the same hunger underneath. I’d stopped being surprised by it years ago. I’d simply stopped expecting anything else.

I remembered her. The woman whose face I could still picture more clearly than I wanted to admit, whose voice still surfaced sometimes in the quiet moments right before sleep, low and warm and startled, like she hadn’t expected kindness any more than I had. She’d vanished before sunrise with my wallet and left nothing behind but a name badge and a word my wolf had refused to stop whispering ever since, and my own grandmother had spent weeks afterward searching for her without ever telling me.

Even she had turned out to be exactly what I expected, in the end. Perhaps especially her, given how thoroughly I’d let my guard down for one reckless night, only to wake up robbed and alone with nothing but a plastic badge to show for it.

The wheelchair’s wheels clicked steadily against the marble as we approached the receiving hall, my grandmother’s voice already carrying ahead of us, bright and warm, greeting whatever gold digger waited on the other side of those doors.

I braced myself the way I always did. Composed. Distant. Already certain of exactly what I’d find.