The Alpha Imposter Wife

NORA POV "Stop it" I whispered to myself. My own voice echoed back at me in the empty hallway. Low. Shaky. I pressed my palm flat against the wooden panel of Rhett's study door and just stood there like an i***t, heart hammering like I had been running. I had not been running. I had been stealing. Not money. Not anything valuable, not in the way people think about valuable. Just information. Border reports. Pack patrol schedules. The kind of stuff that the real Luna of Blackwood Pack would know without having to sneak into her husband's study at four in the morning to read. But I was not the real Luna. I was her twin sister. And I had been pretending to be her for five years. The house was dead quiet except for the low hum of the heating system and the sound of my own breathing. Outside, through the tall windows at the end of the hall, the sky was still that deep blue-black that meant sunrise was at least an hour away. This was my time. The only part of the day that felt like mine, before the pack woke up and I had to be Dana again, had to smile the right way and stand the right way and answer to a name that had never belonged to me. I pushed off the door and started back toward the stairs. Then I heard it. Footsteps. On the floor above me. Moving toward the staircase. My whole body went stiff. Rhett never came down this early. Never. The man was up by six, not four. Four was mine. Four was safe. I spun around and shoved back into the study and yanked the border reports out of my hands and jammed them back into the drawer, all three of them, probably in the wrong order, and then I had about four seconds before the footsteps hit the bottom of the stairs so I moved to the window and grabbed the edge of the curtain and tried to look like someone who was simply standing there. Casually. At four in the morning. In someone else's study. The door opened. Rhett Blackwood filled the doorway the way he filled every room he walked into, which was completely, without trying. Tall. Dark shirt, grey sweatpants, hair slightly messed up from sleep. His grey eyes found me in about half a second and then they did that thing I hated, that slow, deliberate sweep, like he was taking inventory. My chest tightened. "Dana" he said. Not a question. Not a greeting either, really. Just my sister's name in his voice, flat and even. "Hey" I said. Casual. Normal. Cool. "Sorry, I know it's early. I couldn't sleep so I came down for water and saw the light was already on in here. I thought maybe someone left it on." Every single word of that was technically true. The light had been on when I got here because I turned it on. I had come down for water first, I just made a detour. Technically true. Collectively a lie. He looked at me for one second longer than felt comfortable. Then he walked to his desk. Sat down. Opened the drawer. I stopped breathing. He pulled the border reports out. All three of them. He looked at the top one and then set them all down on the desk to his left and opened his laptop like he had somewhere to be at four in the morning and this was perfectly normal. He did not say anything. Did not ask me what I was doing in his study. Did not look at me again. "Okay" I said. "I'll let you work." Nothing. Just the soft click of him typing. I left. In the hallway I walked three steps and then my back hit the wall and I just stood there. Eyes closed. The cold plaster against my shoulders felt like the only solid thing in the world right now. Fine. I was fine. Five years of this and I was still standing, wasn't I? The thing about Rhett was that he never asked. He watched. He noticed. He stored things away behind those grey eyes and never showed you what he was doing with them. Another man might have asked me what I was doing in there. Another man might have made a joke about it. Rhett just looked at me like he was filing something and moved on. I never knew if that meant he was suspicious or if that was just how he existed. It made it worse, honestly. The not knowing. I pushed off the wall and headed for the kitchen. I actually did need water now, my throat was completely dry. The kitchen was cold and smelled like coffee grounds even though nobody had made coffee yet and the marble counter was freezing under my palms when I leaned against it. "Get it together" I muttered. I had done harder things than this. The first week here, back when I had no idea what a Luna's actual day looked like, when I had to fake my way through pack meetings and dinner conversations and moments where pack members came to me with real problems that needed real answers. That was hard. This, some border reports and one man looking at me with no expression, this was nothing. I filled a glass and drank half of it standing at the sink, staring out the window at the dark grounds. The trees at the east edge of the property were just shapes right now, black against a slightly less black sky. Everything still. No movement. No wolves on patrol yet. My phone vibrated on the counter. I frowned. Nobody messaged me at four in the morning. The pack knew better and I had nobody outside the pack who would. I picked it up. The number on the screen made my hand go cold before my brain fully caught up. I had deleted it two years ago. I had decided, firmly and deliberately, that I was done waiting for it to appear. I had moved on from the possibility of it. But I still knew it. Of course I still knew it. I knew my own twin sister's phone number. My thumb hovered over the screen for a second. Then I opened the message. Three words. I'm coming back. The glass slipped in my hand. I caught it. Barely. I read it again. Then again. Like it might say something different the third time, like maybe I misread it, like maybe this was not Dana's number and not Dana's words sitting on my screen at four in the morning in a house I had been living in under her name for five years. I'm coming back. No explanation. No sorry for the five years of silence. No warning. Just those three words, sitting there, calm as anything, while somewhere on the other side of the wall behind me Rhett's footsteps moved across the study floor. My chest hurt. What did that even mean, coming back? Coming back here? Coming back to this pack? Coming back to this life she threw at me and walked away from without looking back? My fingers moved before I decided to let them. "Coming back where" I typed. I stared at the screen. The message sat there on delivered for thirty seconds. A minute. Two minutes. No reply. Of course no reply. That would be too easy, wouldn't it. That would be Dana being considerate of the fact that I was standing in her kitchen in her house with her husband twenty feet away and I had just been blindsided by three words after five years of nothing. I set my phone face-down on the counter. Then I picked it back up. Still nothing. The footsteps in the study had stopped. The house was quiet again. And I stood there in the cold kitchen with Dana's message burning a hole through my palm and tried to figure out what you do when the person whose life you have been living for five years suddenly decides she wants it back.