HIS SURROGATE, HER ALPHA KING

"Someone accessed the clinic's internal records two hours ago," Cael said. "Everything tied to your procedure."

He was standing at the head of the table in the same room I'd found him in earlier, except now the laptops were all open and Lena was beside him with her arms crossed and the man in the suit was gone. The room felt tighter. The air in it had changed.

I walked to the nearest chair and sat down because I needed to be sitting for this and I wasn't going to pretend otherwise.

"What does that mean exactly?" I asked. "What did they get?"

"Your full name. Your address, the old one. Your procedure date, the sample reference, and the assigned donor match." Lena pulled up something on the laptop nearest to her and turned the screen toward me. A log of access timestamps, a string of numbers that meant nothing to me and clearly meant a great deal to both of them. "They went directly to your file. They knew exactly what they were looking for."

"Which means they already knew about the error," I said.

"Yes," Cael said.

I let that sit for a second. "Before you did?"

His jaw tightened. Just slightly. "Possibly. Or at the same time."

I looked at the screen and then back at him. "So when you called me that first night, there was already someone else who knew."

"We believe so."

I had a feeling sitting in my stomach that I recognized from the worst shifts at the hospital, the particular weight of a situation that had already moved past the point where preparation would have helped. You just had to work with where things were now.

"My brother," I said. "Theo. Does he need to be moved?"

Cael looked at me steadily. "We've already put someone on him. As of an hour ago."

I opened my mouth and then closed it. Part of me wanted to argue about the fact that he'd made that call without asking me. The other part, the part that had watched my mother decline for two years and learned the cost of being too proud to accept help in time, let it go.

"Does Theo know?" I asked.

"He knows there's a security detail. He doesn't know why yet. I thought that conversation should come from you."

That was the right answer. I noted that he'd given it without being prompted.

"Okay," I said. "What else?"

Lena pulled up a second screen. "The person who accessed the file used a proxy, but the signature of the intrusion matches two previous incidents connected to Aldric Morse's organization. We can't prove it in a legal sense yet. But we know."

"Who is Aldric Morse?" I asked.

The question landed in a small silence.

Cael came around the table and sat down across from me, which meant he wanted me to actually hear this rather than receive it across a distance.

"He's the other primary candidate for Alpha King," he said. "He leads the Eastern Coalition, four packs in the mid-Atlantic region. He's been my main opposition for two years." He paused. "He's also the kind of man who views people as problems to be solved, and his methods for solving them are not ones I'd want anywhere near you."

"Has he hurt people before?"

"Yes."

"People connected to you specifically?"

Cael's expression didn't change but something behind his eyes did. "My father died four years ago. The official cause was cardiac failure. I have spent those four years building a case that says otherwise."

The room was very quiet.

I looked at him, at the stillness he wore like armor, and understood that this wasn't just politics to him. It never had been.

"And he knows that you know," I said.

"He knows I suspect. He doesn't know how much I've found." He held my gaze. "Which is why I need to be careful. And why I need you to be careful."

I nodded slowly. "What does careful look like from my end?"

"You don't go anywhere alone," Lena said. "Not outside this property. If you go to the hospital, someone goes with you. If you go anywhere, you tell me first."

"I told you I wasn't going to be a prisoner."

"You're not." Lena's voice was flat and matter-of-fact, not unkind, just built from a different material than warmth. "A prisoner doesn't get to set the terms of their own movements. You do. You just don't go alone."

It was a reasonable distinction. I didn't have to like it.

"Fine," I said.

Cael was still watching me. I could feel it even when I wasn't looking directly at him, a steady kind of attention that didn't push but didn't look away either. It was the most consistently unnerving thing about him, the fact that he looked at me like I was worth the effort of paying attention to.

Nate used to look through me when I talked. I hadn't noticed until I had something to compare it to.

I pushed that thought away immediately.

"What happens next?" I asked.

"We continue building the case against Aldric. We keep your presence here quiet for as long as possible. And we wait for the pregnancy confirmation." Cael folded his hands on the table. "Everything moves differently depending on that result."

"Two weeks," I said.

"Yes."

"A lot can happen in two weeks."

"It can," he agreed.

I stood up. My legs were steady, which I was grateful for. "Then I'm going to get some sleep. If anything changes tonight, wake me."

Lena gave me a short nod that I was choosing to interpret as respect.

I walked back up the stairs and down the corridor and into the room that smelled like cedar and clean linen, and I sat on the edge of the large bed and stared at the wall and let myself feel, for just one private minute, how frightened I actually was.

Not of Cael. Not of the estate or the pack or the silver-eyed reality I'd walked into.

Frightened of what it meant that Theo had a security detail on him tonight because of a decision I'd made for myself. Frightened of what it meant that somewhere out there a man I'd never met already knew my name and my address and the most private thing I had done in years.

I had walked into the clinic alone because I was done waiting for life to happen on someone else's terms.

And life, it turned out, had a spectacular sense of humor.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand. A number I didn't recognize.

I stared at it for one ring. Two.

Then I picked it up.

The voice on the other end was smooth and unhurried, like someone who had never once been caught off guard.

"Ms. Crane," it said. "My name is Aldric Morse. I think it's time we spoke directly. Don't you?”