The Alpha's Plump mate

"Two hundred thousand dollars. All you have to do is not ask questions."

Ivy set her coffee down fast, before she dropped it. Gas station coffee, sixty-nine cents with the loyalty card, and she'd been babying it since six a.m. because breakfast wasn't really happening this month.

"Say that number again?"

Priya didn't even blink. She'd clearly said it before, probably a dozen times to a dozen women who'd sat in this exact chair doing the exact math Ivy was doing right now. "Two hundred thousand, base f*e. Medical's separate. There's a completion bonus if you carry to term without complications." She pushed a folder across the desk, thick enough that Ivy almost laughed — it was thicker than every tax return she'd ever filed, combined. "The client's private. I mean really private. That's not something I can walk back today, and it's not something I can explain either."

"Try me."

"Can't." Priya said it gently, which was somehow worse than if she'd been rude about it. "What I can tell you — he's not dangerous. He's not asking for anything outside a standard surrogacy contract. And he's paying about four times market rate for exactly the kind of discretion you're going to want to ask me for the second I finish this sentence. So." She tapped the folder twice. "Ask me something I can actually answer."

Ivy thought about the oxygen machine humming through her mom's bedroom wall at two in the morning. About the hospital letter still sitting unopened on the kitchen counter, because she already knew, roughly, what it was going to say, and some things you just aren't ready to make official yet. About the house — her grandmother's house, though nobody had called it that since before Ivy was born — and the second notice that had shown up last week in red ink, like red ink made it more official than the first one.

"When do I start."

It wasn't even a question by the time it left her mouth.

"That's the spirit," Priya said, and opened the folder like Ivy had already signed something she hadn't signed yet.

The clinic wasn't really a clinic. It called itself one — Larkspur Fertility & Wellness, brushed steel letters over a door that needed a code to open — but the waiting room had the wrong kind of quiet. The expensive kind. No muzak, no ancient magazines curling at the corners. Just a receptionist who looked at Ivy like she already had her social security number memorized, and two chairs, and one other person in the room.

He was standing at the window with his back to her, and Ivy's first thought, the honest one before she talked herself out of it, was that she had never in her life watched someone just occupy a room like that. Not big. Not really. It was more like the room had rearranged itself around him at some point and nobody had bothered mentioning it to him.

"Ms. Marsh. He'll see you now."

"He?" She looked at Priya, who had gotten extremely interested in her tablet in the last four seconds. "I thought this was bloodwork. A screening. I didn't think there'd be—"

"Client requested to meet the candidate before final paperwork." Priya, still not looking up. "It's unusual, and it's also not something I can negotiate for you today. You can walk, Ivy. Nobody's got the door locked."

Ivy looked at the man by the window, who hadn't turned around once, and thought about red ink on a kitchen counter, and did not walk.

He turned when the door clicked shut, and up close he was — worse. Better. She genuinely could not decide which word was lying to her. Dark hair, a jaw that looked like it had never once in its life fully relaxed, and eyes a shade of amber that had no business existing outside of contact lenses. He looked at her the way you look at a math problem you've already solved and you're just double-checking your work out of habit.

Then he breathed in. Slow. Deliberate. Like he was tasting the air instead of just moving it through his lungs.

Every hair on Ivy's arms stood straight up.

"If you say something's wrong with my coffee order I'm going to assume you're a serial killer with a really specific sense of smell," Ivy said, because it was that or scream.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile, not quite. "Kade Voss." No handshake offered. "You're later than I expected."

"You expected me?"

"I expected someone." A pause, small, deliberate, a man choosing which true thing to hand over first. "Not you specifically. That part's — new."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed easily. "It isn't."

He nodded at the chair across from his own and Ivy sat down in it, because the alternative was standing in a locked-feeling room with a man who'd just smelled her like she was something he'd spent his whole life looking for, and her knees weren't going to hold that particular line much longer either way.

"I'll be direct," Kade said, once she was seated. "The contract Ms. Okafor drew up for you isn't the whole arrangement. It's the part that's safe to put on paper."

"And the unsafe part?"

"Requires you to believe something first. Something most people go their entire lives assuming isn't real." He watched her face carefully while he said it, like a man testing ice with one boot before he puts his weight on it. "I'd rather show you than explain it. Explaining makes me sound insane. Showing you just makes me inconvenient, which I can live with."

"You are doing an incredible job of talking me into staying, by the way."

"I'm not trying to talk you into anything." That part, at least, came out flat and plain, no salesman's shine on it anywhere. "I'm giving you the chance to leave now, before you can't unknow it. Most people who see what I'm about to show you don't get that chance. Ms. Okafor screened for someone with no family who'd come looking. No ties that'd ask questions if you vanished for the winter. You've got both, which is honestly the only reason you're sitting in that chair right now instead of on a list of people we quietly ruled out."

Ivy's mouth had gone completely dry. "That's supposed to make me feel safe?"

"It's supposed to make you understand the stakes accurately. Which is about as close to safe as I've got to offer you today." He crossed to the door and turned the lock — one small click, no drama to it at all, which somehow made it worse than drama would have. "I need you to not scream. I need you to stay in that chair. And in about ten seconds I need you to remember that I chose to show you this instead of letting the contract explain it to you in month three, when you wouldn't have had any choice left at all."

"You're scaring me."

"I know." Something crossed his face — regret, maybe, on a different man it would've definitely been regret. "I'm sorry. I'm not going to hurt you. I just need that to be the last true thing you hear before the next part happens."

"What next par—"

It didn't look like the movies. No groan of bone, nothing slow-motion about it. One second Kade Voss was a man standing at a locked door, and the next second, for half a heartbeat, he simply wasn't a man at all — something huge, dark-furred, and impossibly still-present filled the exact space where he'd been standing, and the eyes were the only thing that hadn't changed, gold and careful and watching her like even mid-change his first priority was making sure she didn't bolt straight into the wall behind her.

Then he was Kade again. Breathing hard. One hand braced flat against the door like the change had cost him something real.

Ivy realized, from somewhere very far away, that the coffee cup had slipped right out of her fingers and was bleeding lukewarm gas-station coffee into Larkspur Fertility & Wellness's very expensive carpet. She hadn't made a single sound the whole time. Not one.

"Say something," Kade said, quiet.

"I—" Her voice came out about half its normal size. "I need you to tell me the rest. All of it. Right now, not later."

"All of it's a lot."

"I don't care." She stood up, legs not entirely cooperating, chin up anyway, because whatever else was true tonight, she had not come this far in her life to be the woman who fainted in some locked office. "You want two hundred thousand dollars' worth of my silence, you're going to give me two hundred thousand dollars' worth of the truth first. Starting with why a werewolf needs a surrogate instead of just — whatever the normal method is, for werewolves."

"That's the part," Kade said, "you're really not going to like."

"Try me," Ivy said, without meaning to echo Priya, and watched something that looked a lot like admiration move behind his amber eyes.

"It's not a clinical procedure. The conception." A beat. "For what I need — an heir the pack law will actually recognize as legitimate — it has to happen the old way. The way it's happened for four hundred years. Bonded. Under a full moon. With me."

The room went very quiet.

"You mean," Ivy said, slow, "somewhere in that folder there's a clause about—"

"Yes."

"And you weren't going to lead with that part."

"I was going to lead with the money," Kade said, "because the money's the only part of this I'm not ashamed of."

Ivy looked down at the coffee stain spreading across the carpet, then at her own hands, steadier than they had any right to be, and then back up at the man who had just turned into something out of a nightmare and still somehow managed to make plain honesty sound like the more dangerous thing he'd said all day.

"When's the next full moon."

Something shifted in his face — surprise, maybe, that she'd asked instead of bolted for the door.

"Four days," he said.

Ivy picked the folder back up off the desk, coffee-damp at one corner now, and didn't let her hand shake while she did it.

"Then you'd better tell me everything else," she said, "before I have to decide."