The Fake Daughter Sold Her Blood, So the Alpha Bought Her Back novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Donor W4

Rhys tells her he has been living on her blood for four months and offers a deal; Sabrina walks in with a key.

"Say that again," I said.

Rhys Hargrove sat back in his chair and let me stare at him.

"You've been selling me my own medicine," he said. "Every Tuesday and Thursday, for four months."

"You're the rare-type buyer."

"The clinic is mine. The third floor is the pack's wing, and your blood goes upstairs to me."

I looked down at the bandage still taped inside my elbow.

Then I looked at the long glass window, the clean grey room, the water jug on the table by the bed.

I wanted to throw the jug at him.

"Why does an Alpha need a stranger's blood?"

"Because I'm dying."

He said it flatly, with no pity for himself.

"It's called the Hollow. It eats an Alpha from the inside, and it took my father at forty-four."

"You're thirty-three."

"I know how old I am."

He rubbed his thumb along the head of his cane.

"There is exactly one thing that slows it down. The blood of a white wolf."

"I'm not a white anything."

"The lab ran your sample forty-one times because they didn't believe it either." His eyes met mine. "Donor W4. It's you."

The room was very quiet.

I could hear his heart now, slow and uneven, with a catch in it every few beats.

I wanted to say he was lying, but I could not hear a lie.

"Six years," I said. "Six years I was told I was nothing. No wolf, no blood, no name. And you're telling me I've been the best thing in this city, and nobody said a word."

"I found out two weeks ago."

"And what did you do with it?"

"I followed you."

He didn't look away when he said it.

"I sat outside your building and outside your clinic. I wanted to know who you were before I put my hand on your life."

"You mean you watched me."

"Yes."

It was the second time he'd admitted it, and I hated how little it cost him.

I pushed the blanket off and swung my legs over the side of the bed.

"Then watch me leave."

"Willa, if you leave now, you will be in a hospital by tonight. Your body is throwing off six years of drug. It's already healed your knee."

I looked at my knee.

He was right, and that made me angrier.

"What do you want?"

"Your blood. A pint a week, drawn here, by me, in this room."

"By you?"

"The nurses are loyal to me, but I won't have you on a clinic table where Conrad Dunleavy can send a man up the stairs. I draw it myself."

He pulled a folded paper from his breast pocket and laid it on the quilt.

"You'll be paid. Your debts, your rent, a new apartment, a doctor who isn't my fiancée's father's pet. Name the number."

I almost laughed.

Nobody had asked me to name a number in six years.

"Say I do it," I said. "What are the rules?"

"You tell me."

"One. Nobody touches me but you, and you touch me only with the needle."

His mouth twitched.

"Two. I'm not marrying your pack, I'm not joining your pack, and I don't owe you a thing when you get well."

"Agreed."

"Three. You find out who gave my doctor his orders."

Something moved behind his eyes.

"That," he said, "I was going to do anyway."

"Then we have a deal."

He held out his hand.

I didn't take it, so he opened his palm and turned my arm over instead.

His fingers were cool.

He pulled the tape off my elbow very slowly and looked at the bruise where the clinic needle had gone in.

His thumb pressed lightly along the vein.

A line of heat ran up my arm and into my chest, and I stopped breathing.

He felt it too.

I knew because his thumb went still, and the pulse in his wrist jumped under my fingers.

Neither of us moved.

"Does it do that every time?" I said, and my voice came out thin.

"I don't know," he said. "It never has."

The front door of his apartment clicked.

A key turned, and heels crossed the marble in the hall.

"Rhys? Baby?" Sabrina called. "I brought lunch. Why is there a car from the clinic downstairs?"

He let go of my arm.

Then she walked into the bedroom with a paper bag in one hand and her phone in the other.

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