Chapter 2

"Sit back down," Kade said. "You're not steady yet, whatever you think."

He was right, which annoyed her more than the werewolf thing had, somehow. Ivy sat.

"Pack law." He didn't ease into it. Just started talking, like a man who'd rehearsed this in his head a hundred times and had given up trying to make it sound less insane. "There's exactly one rule that can't be bent, changed, or voted around, and it's this: an alpha holds his seat by blood, not by popularity, not by strength alone. If I don't have a recognized heir by the winter solstice, my seat goes to whoever's next in the succession line. That's my cousin. Damon."

"And Damon's bad."

"Damon's ambitious." Kade's jaw did something complicated. "Which isn't the same thing, and I'd be lying if I said it was, and I don't lie to people I'm about to ask something enormous of. He'd probably run the pack fine. He'd also sell off half our land to developers inside two years to pay off what he already owes, and he'd do it smiling."

"So you need a baby. On a deadline."

"I need an heir the pack will actually recognize as legitimate. There's a difference, and it's the difference that's about to ruin your next four days." He finally sat down across from her again, elbows on his knees, like the posture cost him something to hold onto. "Legitimate means bonded conception. Under a full moon. Between an alpha and — historically — his mate. Except I don't have one of those, and pack law's old enough that it never accounted for a man in my position needing another option."

"So they added surrogates."

"Ninety years ago. After the last alpha who didn't have a mate lined up in time nearly lost the pack to exactly the kind of cousin I've got." Something flickered behind his eyes, gone before Ivy could name it. "The ritual doesn't care who's underneath me when it happens. It only cares that it's me, and that it's the moon, and that whoever I've chosen consents to it going in. That's the part Priya's contract can put on paper. Consent. Compensation. What happens to the money if it doesn't take."

"And what happens to me. After."

"After the birth, you're released from the contract with the full payment, a standard NDA, and my word that nobody in this pack will ever contact you again unless you want them to." A beat. "I know my word doesn't mean much to you yet."

"No," Ivy agreed. "It really doesn't."

He didn't argue with her about it, which she noticed, and which she hated that she noticed.

"Four pairings, minimum," he said. "One per full moon, until it takes. Some surrogates need one. Some need six. I can't tell you which one you'll be."

"That's not ominous at all."

"You asked me not to lie to you ten minutes ago by walking into this room instead of out of it," Kade said. "I'm holding up my end."

She read the contract twice. Once fast, skimming for the number, and once slow, actually reading it, sitting in the coffee-stained chair with Priya hovering by the door like a woman who'd learned the hard way not to rush this part.

It was worse than Ivy expected and somehow also more careful than she expected — clauses about her mother's medical costs being covered separately if anything happened to Ivy during the pregnancy, a clause about housing at "the property" that specified a private wing, locks on the inside of every door that were hers alone to control. Someone had thought about this. Someone had thought about her specifically, not just the shape of a surrogate-sized problem.

"You wrote some of this yourself," she said. "Didn't you. Not your lawyers."

Kade didn't answer that directly, which was its own kind of answer.

"The full moon's in four days," he said instead. "I'd rather you spend them at home, with your mother, thinking clearly, than here. I'll send a car the morning of. You can still say no that morning. The car doesn't obligate you to anything, and neither does the signature you're about to put on that page, not really, not the way you think it does."

"Then what does obligate me?"

"Nothing does. That's the part people don't believe until it's too late to matter." He looked at her, steady, amber eyes doing that thing again where they seemed to be reading something written just under her skin. "You can walk away at any point before the bonding actually happens. After — the biology doesn't care what either of us wants anymore. That's the only door that locks. Everything before it is still open."

Ivy signed on the line Priya pointed to, hand steadier than it had any right to be, and didn't let herself think about the word biology sitting there in his sentence like a small, patient trap.

"One more thing," Kade said, once the pen was down. "You should know before you leave this room. Not because the contract requires it. Because I'd want to know, if I were you."

"What."

"The scent-screening Priya ran on your intake form three weeks ago. It's not just for compatibility." He hesitated, actually hesitated, the first genuinely unsteady thing she'd seen him do since he'd turned back into a man. "It flags something else too. Something rarer."

"Kade."

"It's not relevant to the contract," he said, too fast, the closest thing to a lie she'd caught him in all day. "Not yet. Maybe not ever. I shouldn't have brought it up."

"You brought it up on purpose. You don't strike me as a man who says things by accident."

Something crossed his face — the door shutting again, whatever had almost opened closing back up before she could see through it.

"Four days," he said. "The car comes at nine."

Priya walked her out through the brushed-steel door, back into a parking lot that felt aggressively, almost insultingly normal after the last two hours. Same cracked asphalt. Same bus stop across the street with the ad for a mattress store peeling off one corner. Ivy's ten-year-old Civic sat exactly where she'd left it, looking smaller than it had that morning.

"You did good in there," Priya said, and for the first time all day sounded like an actual person instead of a woman reading off a script. "Most candidates cry. Some run. You just — signed."

"Is that a compliment?"

"It's an observation." Priya glanced back at the building, then lowered her voice like the walls might still be listening. "He's never brought anyone in for an in-person before the paperwork. Not once, in three years I've been running his screenings. Whatever that scent-thing was he almost told you about — I'd think hard about it, if I were you. Men like him don't get nervous over nothing."

"You know what it is."

"I know what I'm guessing it is," Priya said. "And it's not my place to guess out loud to you. Go home, Ivy. Sleep. Kiss your mom goodnight and don't tell her any of this, because there isn't a version of this she'd take well, and you already know that or you wouldn't have come alone." She was already turning back toward the door. "Nine a.m., four days from now. Wear something you don't mind never seeing again."

Ivy sat in her car for a long time before she turned the key, both hands on the wheel, watching her own breath fog up a windshield that hadn't needed defrosting in months.

Her phone buzzed in the cupholder. A text from her mother's home aide.

Your mom's asking for you. Nothing urgent, she just wants to see your face. Can you swing by before dinner?

Ivy looked at the folder on the passenger seat, at the two hundred thousand dollars and the four days and the word biology still sitting somewhere behind her ribs like a stone she'd swallowed wrong, and started the car.

She'd have three days to figure out how to lie to her mother's face about where all that money was coming from.

She did not, yet, have any idea how to lie to herself about the way her whole body had gone electric the second Kade Voss looked at her like she was something he'd been searching for his entire life.