The Wolf Auction

Chapter 3

The cardiologist has the kind of face that was built for delivering catastrophic news—sympathetic forehead, practiced mouth, hands folded like a seminar graduate in gentle devastation. He's been talking for four minutes, and every sentence is a different route to the same destination.

"The deterioration has accelerated beyond what we anticipated." He glances at my mother's chart like it personally offended him. "The valve function has dropped significantly since the last echocardiogram."

"In English, Dr. Kaplan." My mother shifts against the hospital pillow, tubes trailing from her wrist like party streamers at the world's worst celebration. "Preferably the kind with a punchline."

"The surgical window is narrowing." He turns to me because apparently I'm the one in the room he's decided can absorb a direct hit. "Four to six weeks before intervention becomes significantly riskier."

"How much?" He names a number that has no business existing outside of luxury real estate transactions, and every muscle in my jaw locks down simultaneously.

He keeps talking—payment plans, financial counseling, hospital assistance programs—all of it landing like rain on concrete, rolling sideways without soaking in. The fluorescent overhead buzzes at a frequency specifically engineered for purgatory.

"Well," my mother says into the silence he leaves behind, "the ambulance was a bit dramatic, don't you think? I fainted once in the kitchen. The neighbours could have driven me."

My fingernails press half-moons into my kneecaps. I stare at the whiteboard where someone has written DR. KAPLAN—CARDIOLOGY in cheerful blue marker, like this is summer camp and not the room where they put a calendar on your mother's heartbeat.

"Bailee." Mom's hand finds mine, paper-thin and warm. "Stop doing math. I can hear the calculator behind your eyes from here."

"I'm not doing math." I am absolutely doing math—four to six weeks, the quoted number minus my savings equals selling organs on the black market, plural, possibly a lung.

"Liar." She squeezes my fingers with more strength than a woman attached to three monitors should possess. "You've been doing math since you were twelve and I couldn't pay the electricity bill."

"The face is just thinking about dinner options." I squeeze back carefully, like she bruises faster than I can blink.

"The face is terrified and hiding it from a woman who invented that exact trick." Her eyes—my eyes, same amber, minus the gold—hold mine with a steadiness no body this fragile has a right to.

"Whatever you're calculating, stop." Her grip tightens on my fingers. "I didn't raise you to bankrupt yourself keeping me alive."

"You raised me to be stubborn. So this is entirely your fault."

She laughs, and the heart monitor beside her spikes once—a small green mountain—then settles. I watch the line flatten back to rhythm and file the number away in the part of my brain where I keep things too heavy to carry and too dangerous to set down.

This evening at the conference room on the fourteenth floor has a mahogany table that seats twenty and smells like money pretending to be wood polish. At eleven p.m., it's just me, a mop bucket, and the faint ghost of cologne from whatever executive meeting marinated in here.

I'm wringing the mop head when the door opens behind me and two distinct scents walk into the room before their owners do. One sharp and cold—cedar, something metallic underneath, the olfactory equivalent of a closed fist. The other deeper, like woodsmoke and aged leather.

I turn around with a mop in one hand and the expression I've been rehearsing for two weeks—I am furniture, please proceed. It crashes directly into two men who are not proceeding anywhere.

Blake Wallace fills the doorway like he was architecturally designed for it—six-three, gunmetal eyes that sweep the room once before landing on me.

Behind him, Spencer leans against the frame, radiating the quiet force of someone who has never needed to raise his voice. Every room bends around him voluntarily, and this one is no exception.

"Bailee." Blake's voice is flat—not a question, not an accusation. A geological survey, his gaze dropping to the mop in my hand, then back up to my face. “Edric’s daughter.”

"And you're blocking my clean floor." I grip the mop handle like a scepter. "The wax takes twenty minutes to dry."

"Why is the Alpha's daughter cleaning conference rooms at midnight?" Spencer asks it the way you'd ask someone standing on a ledge—careful, direct, calculating the distance down.

"Because the Alpha's daughter doesn't have a trust fund, a pack salary, or a fairy godmother." The mop goes back in the bucket, and my arms ache to the bone. "My father's death killed the money too. This isn't my only job, if you’re worried—I work two others, and the math still doesn't add up."

"Doesn't add up to what?" Blake hasn't moved from the doorway, arms crossed, that sleeve tattoo vanishing under rolled cuffs. I hate the corner of my brain that catalogs the architecture of his forearms instead of focusing.

"To keeping my mother alive." The sentence comes out raw, flat, stripped of every sardonic buffer I own. "She's dying. The surgery window is closing."

"Every wolf in this building would rather watch me scrub toilets than share their oxygen." My voice doesn't crack—it goes industrial, load-bearing, the kind that holds weight until the building's empty.

"But I'm still here." I grip the cart handle until my knuckles go pale. "Because her heartbeat matters more than my pride."

The silence that follows has mass. Spencer's jaw shifts—small, tight—and his eyes change temperature in a way I track without meaning to. Blake's stillness deepens into something almost geological, his fingers pressing against his own bicep like he's keeping something under the surface.

I didn’t mean to trauma dump upon meeting them for the first time in ten years, but guess what I just did.

"How short are you?" Spencer's voice drops half a register, and something behind my sternum responds treacherously.

"Short enough that I'm standing here at midnight debating it instead of sleeping." I pull the cart toward the door. "Three more floors and a bus to catch, so if you'll excuse me."

They part—Blake stepping left, Spencer right—and the gap between them feels less like courtesy and more like a corridor engineered to make me feel every inch of passing through. Cedar and woodsmoke layer the air, and my pulse commits a small treason I refuse to acknowledge or name.

"Bailee." Spencer's voice catches me two steps past the threshold. I stop walking but don't turn around, my fingers white on the cart handle. "If the math changes—come to us."

I walk away without answering, cart wheels squeaking against tile. I do not think about storm-blue eyes or the way my name sounded like something worth saying carefully.

I think about numbers. About four to six weeks shrinking. About the draft application saved on my phone, the one I built three months ago at two a.m. on a site designed for desperate women with exactly one thing left to sell.

I didn't send it then. My thumb hovered over the button and I closed the screen, and I told myself there had to be another way to get the money.

I'm running out of other ways.

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