Semua Bab SURROGATE FOR THE ALPHA: Bab 21 - Bab 30

Chapter 21 Liam POVAshley reads the message to me twice, her voice tight and thin the second time, as though repeating the words might somehow drain them of their power. It doesn't. If anything, saying them aloud only sharpens the dread already settling into my chest, cold and precise.Ask your mother about the ring, Ashley. Ask her who gave it to her, and why she buried it in a place she thought no one would ever look."He's watching us," Ashley whispers, staring at the screen like it might rearrange itself into something less terrifying if she looks long enough. "Liam, he knew the exact moment we started talking about my mother. How does he know that? Is there a device in this room, is that even possible?""We'll sweep every inch of this house again," I say, already reaching for my phone to wake the security team, though privately I doubt we'll find anything, because whoever we're chasing has never needed devices in the walls to know things he shouldn't. He's proven that already,

Chapter 23 Ashley POVThe kettle starts to whistle behind her, but my mother doesn't move to take it off the burner, standing frozen with her phone in one hand, staring at the screen like it might bite her."Mom." I'm on my feet before I've decided to be, crossing the small kitchen to her side. "Who is it?"She doesn't answer right away, and when the phone finally stops buzzing on its own, going silent, she sets it face down on the counter with hands that aren't quite steady, reaching past it to pull the kettle off the heat instead, as though the sudden domestic task might smooth over whatever just happened in front of me."Wrong number," she says, not looking at me. "Happens all the time with these robocalls.""You went pale." I keep my voice gentle, but I don't let it go, not this time, not after everything that's happened these past days. "Mom, first the news, and now this. You're scaring me. Please, just tell me what's going on."She stands there a long moment with her back to me

Chapter 25 Liam POVElena refuses to stay in the apartment after that, and I don't fight her on it, arranging a room at the estate before the sun is fully up, guards posted at every entrance this time, no gaps, no assumptions. Ashley didn’t leave her mother's side for the rest of the day, and I let her have that, let the two of them sit together in the quiet without pushing for more answers than either of them has strength left to give tonight.It's well past midnight before I finally sit down alone with the file Sienna pulled days ago, the one I never let myself open properly, the heavily redacted employment record with its solid black bars and its single unredacted fragment. Termination requested personally by A. Ashworth, at the recommendation of. I read it over and over by lamplight, turning the page as though a different angle might reveal ink that isn't there, and I think about Elena's face tonight, gray and terrified in that bathroom doorway, and I think about a ring buried in

Chapter 27 Ashley POVI'm sitting with my mother in the room Liam had prepared for her when Julian and Sienna find us, both of their faces carrying the particular stillness of people who've just learned something they don't know how to say out loud yet."There's a second address," Sienna says, once Liam has joined us, once the door is closed and it's only the five of us in the room. "Tied to the same shell company. Less than four miles from here.""Do we know what's there?" Liam asks."Not yet. I've got a tracker doing a discreet pass by tonight, nothing that would tip anyone off." Sienna's eyes flick toward Elena, apologetic. "I didn't want to say more than that in front of.""I'm not made of glass," my mother says quietly, though her hands are folded so tightly in her lap that her knuckles have gone white. "Say what you need to say, all of you. I would rather know."Nobody argues with her. I find myself grateful for that, grateful that this house, despite everything it's cost us, h

Chapter 29 Ashley POVThe device sits on a square of white cloth in the center of the study table, small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, ordinary looking in a way that makes it worse somehow, black plastic, a thin antenna, nothing about it screaming danger except everything it represents."It was tucked behind the changing table," Julian says. "Wired into the baby monitor's power supply, drawing current so it would never need a battery swap that might get noticed.""The nursery." My voice comes out strangled. "Liam, he's been listening from the nursery. The room where our daughter is supposed to sleep.""We don't know how long it's been there," Liam says, though the grim set of his jaw tells me he suspects the answer is worse than any of us want to hear. "Sienna's having it analyzed. If we're lucky, it'll tell us more about who built it than it ever told him about us."I don't feel lucky. I feel sick, and exhausted, and something colder than either, the particular violation of i