I leaned back in my chair, studying her.
Raymond’s notes were clipped to the inside of the folder. I’d read them twice already, but I read them again.
Bloodline traces back to the Treme Guardians—one of the foundational families in New Orleans. Community anchors. Protected by ancestral power. Spiritual lineage runs deep. Maternal grandmother was a root worker. Great-grandfather helped rebuild after the 1927 flood. The Renois name carries weight in certain circles.
I’d grown up hearing stories about families like hers. The ones who’d survived slavery, Jim Crow, Katrina, and every other attempt to erase them. The ones the ancestors watched over because their blood was tied to the city itself.
Old magic. Old power.
The kind you couldn’t buy or steal.
And here she was—living in a shotgun house with an alcoholic mama, working double shifts at a nursing home, broke in every way that mattered. Raymond’s notes were through.
But her eyes in this photograph didn’t look broken.
They lookedalive.
I traced the edge of the photo with my thumb, then caught myself and pulled my hand back.
What the hell was I doing?
This wasn’t about her. This was about biology. A contract. A solution to a problem I couldn’t fix any other way.
I’d rejected fourteen women because they didn’t understand what this was. They thought it was romance or rescue or some kind of fairy tale where the rich man falls for the poor girl and everything works out.
But Truth hadn’t looked like that.
She’d looked like she was trying to figure out if all this was real.
And when the form asked her why she wanted to do this, she didn’t lie.
Because I need the money. And because I’m good at keeping promises.
No performance. No manipulation.
Just honesty.
I stared at her photograph and felt something shift in my chest—I didn’t have a name for it and didn’t want to examine.
She had light in her.
Real light.
The kind that didn’t come from money or power or control. The kind that came from surviving and still choosing to be soft.
And I was a man who lived in the dark.
I closed the file and set it on the desk.
This was dangerous.
Not the contract. Not the surrogacy. Not even the risk of my enemies finding out.
Her.
She was dangerous because she made me want things I’d stopped wanting years ago.
Connection. Warmth. Something that wasn’t transactional.
