Page 61 of The CEO Alpha’s Substitute Mate

“I’ll make sure of it.” He looks down at my hand on his sleeve, then back up. “Please don’t worry.”

He goes. I last a few seconds before I put my ear against the door.

I know exactly how pathetic this is, but I do it anyway. At first there’s nothing but the low back and forth of two men who have both dropped their voices. Then Salar’s rises for half a sentence, and the word in it is wolf.

I hold my breath and press harder into the wood. Somebody says shifter, then alpha, then something about a first shift. Callum answers in three or four words, and the voices drop back under the door where I can’t reach them. I sit down on the runner with my back against the wall and my heart slamming.

I have deliberately tried to be obtuse to all these words and titles. This is already a new place. I didn’t want to ask questions and be thrown out for them. So I endured. Every time I wanted to ask questions, I would force my thoughts away, try not to dwell on it because somewhere deep inside I knew that only something that is not human would call someone human in such a way.

It’s impossible. It has to be.

I get my phone out. Shifter turns up nothing at all. Alpha wolf turns up a fantasy wiki and a supplement company. I go three pages deeper, then four, and on a website that was built in 2004, then abandoned in 2006, I find eleven sentences with no author’s name on them. Shifters are humans who take wolf form. They are led by alphas, and they consider ordinary humans beneath them. That is the entire article. It talks a bit about packs and territories, but the information is vague, almost as if written by an angry teenager who forgot all about it. I don’t even know if it’s real.

I want to laugh out loud, sitting on the carpet of a hallway in a house with thirty bedrooms and an indoor pool, reading about magical beings on my phone. Then I think about all the insults I’ve received since I got here, all targeted at me being a human, people around Callum calling him Alpha, fearing him.

I put the phone face down on my knee. What if it’s true?

Or what if I’ve finally cracked?

Neither option makes me feel any better.

The door moves, and I’m on my feet before it’s all the way open. Salar comes out with his bag in his hand and his sleeves still up, his face weary.

“I’ve given him the medicine. Hopefully it should have an impact.”

“What disease?” I’m blocking the corridor, and I don’t care. “You mentioned a disease.”

He looks at me for a long time. Up close, he’s an old man who seems tired enough that I feel unkind for asking.

“I can’t tell you. I’m sorry.”

He goes around me and down the stairs. Inside, the curtains have been half drawn. Luca is on his back in the middle of that enormous bed with his arms thrown wide, a cloth on his forehead, asleep. I go to him and put my hand where the cloth isn’t. The heat is still under the skin, but he isn’t burning anymore, and his breathing has slowed to a rate I know.

Callum is in the chair beside the bed with his elbows on his knees. “Callum.” I don’t take my hand off my son. “Don’t you think you need to tell me the truth now?”

He doesn’t move.

“I’ve been keeping my eyes and my ears shut ever since I got here. Deliberately. I decided that whatever this family is, it isn’t mine, and I was going to keep doing that.” My throat closes, and I push past it. “But this changes things. If Luca’s illness has anything to do with the secrets you’re keeping, then I need to know.”

He says nothing at all, just keeps looking at the boy. So I come around the end of the bed and sit down on the edge of it, directly in front of him, close enough that he has nowhere else to put his eyes.

“Callum, please.” My hands are on my knees. “The one thing I will never negotiate on is my son’s health. Tell me the truth.”

He looks up at me, and he holds my eyes for so long that I start to hear the clock on the landing. My knee is against his shin. Neither of us moves it.

“If I tell you the truth,” he says, “you will never be allowed to go back to your life as it was.”

“What life?” It comes out of me before he’s finished. “Luca is my life.”

“The world you know. It will change.”

“I don’t care. Luca is my only family.”

He shuts his eyes for about a second. “All right.”

He stands and holds his hand out. I take it before I’ve thought about whether I want to, and he leads me out into the corridor. At the head of the stairs, he stops one of the staff and tells her to bring Salar back up to sit with the boy. We wait. Salar comes up without a word and goes in, then the door shuts behind him.

Callum takes me down the back stairs, out through the side door, and across the lawn. He doesn’t stop at the hedge, and he doesn’t stop at the gravel path I wore a groove in this morning. We go over the lawn toward the tree line with the light behind us turning amber. My shoes are wrong for this. I don’t say so.