Page 2 of The Alpha's Surrogate

So I try not to fall asleep. I’m exhausted, but I won’t. She’s humming quietly behind me, her frail hand holding my pink, tiny one.

Blink.

I don’t know when I drift off, but I feel when she’s cut off from me.

Blink.

***

Josie blinked awake in her bedroom. She could still feel the fringes of the dream she’d just had. She dreamed of her mother more and more these days, and with startling clarity.

The dreams felt more like a memory to her, detailed with conversation, though she had no idea how she managed to remember events that had happened to her when she was just a newborn baby.

The dreams had started coming to her after her grandfather died a month ago. At first, she’d see snippets from the day the were-bears had returned her home. And then those snippets turned into full recollections.

It wasn’t until the were-bears finally came to her front door that she pieced the bits of her dreams together. Klaus was older now, but she would have recognized him in a crowd. His lake-blue eyes, his powerful jaw, and his wavy blond hair that now had streaks of white in it.

Garry looked the same, only bigger and darker. His eyes had retreated into his face, and there was a long scar that ran from his temple to his neck. The scar had gone pale, like a line of silver on his white face.

If he’d been scary before, he was menacing now. Everything about him screamed danger, and Josie did not wish to be on the wrong side of his temper. She’d recognized them the moment she opened the door, a strong feeling of déjà vu filling up her insides.

While her life hadn’t been rosy, it hadn’t been hard either. Until the were-bears returned to collect. She wished that she’d never met them. She wished her mother had never gone looking for them in the first place.

She couldn’t, for the life of her, understand why her mother would want to be involved with such people. They didn’t care that she had nothing to do with her mother’s arrangement with them. It was of no importance to them that she was mourning the only family she’d ever had.

They had come back to collect, and had made it clear to Josie that nothing else mattered to them. As far as they were concerned, nothing else should matter more to her either.

Josie rubbed her forehead. Her head ached something furious, as it always did when she dreamed about her mother and the were-bears. She was starting to get used to it, and kept some herbs in the drawer next to the bed to help with the pain.

She reached around in the near darkness, pulled two soft leaves out from the bundle, and balled them together in one hand. She chewed the bitter herb mechanically, making sure it was ground thoroughly before she swallowed.

She washed it down with the glass of water sitting on the bedside table and grimaced at the harshness of the bitter aftertaste. She settled back into the bed, her sweat cooling her skin. Closing her eyes, she enjoyed the early-morning quiet. This was the most peace she could hope to find today.

Her phone buzzed after a few minutes and she reached around blindly for it. She squinted at the screen, her eyes adjusting to the brightness. There was a text from Klaus, reminding her to pay her debt and telling her not to forget the consequences of delaying. Great.

She knew better than to hope to find any sleep now. It was still about an hour before sunrise, but the text from Klaus and the painkiller both worked in concert to jolt her wide awake.

Images from her dream danced in and out of her mind: The cold, damp room where her mother had been kept. The long, low-ceilinged house was built into the side of the mountain. The dark, angry eyes of the men they’d passed the day she and her mother had returned home.

Her mother had gotten in bed with some pretty dangerous people. She’d died and left Josie alone to pay a steep price for her mistakes. In some ways, Josie felt she had been paying for her mother’s mistakes from the day she was born.

She tossed the covers aside and walked barefooted into the bathroom. She turned on the light and stared at her reflection in the mirror. She was an exact replica of her mother—blonde hair, blue eyes, and a pointed chin.

She splashed cold water on her face and gurgled some of it to get rid of the bitter taste in her mouth. There was no point. The bitter taste of baneroot would linger for hours.

She could have used other more palatable herbs, but those had more unpleasant side effects. Plus, baneroot made her more alert, and she needed that extra energy now more than ever. She splashed some more water on her face, then stepped out of the bathroom.

Outside, the sky was turning from pitch-black to dark blue. Sweet songs of birds from the forest below drifted into the open windows, and she could smell the rich scents of the forest as a cold wind blew into her room.

A run would do wonders for her mood, she knew, but she didn’t feel up to it. Not this morning, at least. She picked up her phone and read Klaus’ text again. The urgency was alarming.

He emphasized again that she wasn’t to seek help from anyone. Any interference from her pack would result in her death, plain and simple. They had a network around the world, and he had a way to dowse her out using some blood he’d gotten from her as a child, if it ever crossed her mind to run away.

Josie had heard about dark magic during her studies, although she didn’t trust all the things they said someone could do with another person’s blood. Still, she didn’t plan to find out if she didn’t have to.

She turned on her laptop and opened the link to the surrogacy site. She couldn’t believe she was considering this, but she was bang out of options. It would take her years to save up the money her mother owed the were-bears if she depended on her salary from the lab alone.

“Where in the world am I supposed to find such money?” she’d asked Klaus when he told her how much her mother’s debt was. She had no doubt that the figure she’d been told was several times more than the original amount, but who could she ask to verify?