The Alpha Imposter Wife

Chapter 30: Rhett and Marcus

NORA POV

“You’re going to stand there the whole time, aren’t you”

I spun around.

Bex was leaning against the far wall of the corridor with her arms crossed and a coffee cup in each hand and that face she got when she was pretending not to find something funny.

“I’m not doing anything” I said.

“You’re standing six feet from Rhett’s study door with your arms at your sides like you’re waiting for a bus.” She pushed off the wall and walked toward me. “Which you are not.”

“I just happened to be walking past.”

“You’ve been walking past for ten minutes.” She held one of the cups out. “Drink this.”

I took it. Didn’t drink it.

From behind the study door, nothing. Not even the shape of voices yet.

“Marcus went in three minutes before you showed up” Bex said. She kept her voice low. “I saw him in the corridor. He looked terrible.”

“He hasn’t slept.”

“No.” She looked at the door. “Do you know what Rhett’s going to do?”

“No.”

She nodded. Didn’t push. Just stood beside me with her own coffee and we both stood there in the corridor being entirely normal people who were not listening at a door.

Then the voices started.

Not words. I could not make out words, the door was too solid and Rhett’s study walls were thick. Just tone. The shape of a conversation. Rhett’s voice first, low and steady, the same flat control he used for everything. No heat in it. No anger I could pick up through wood and plaster.

Marcus answered. Lower. Slower.

Then Rhett again. Still level.

I pressed the coffee cup against my chest and just listened to the shape of it going back and forth and tried to read something from what I couldn’t hear.

Then Marcus’s voice broke.

Just once. One moment where the low steady back-and-forth changed and something cracked through it. Not loud. Not a shout. Just a c***k. The kind that happened when someone had been holding something a very long time and their grip slipped for one second.

I closed my eyes.

A long silence after that.

Long enough that Bex shifted beside me.

And then a door somewhere deeper in the house opened. Footsteps. Coming toward this corridor from the other end.

I moved. Fast. Away from the study door and down the corridor with Bex right behind me and I turned the corner and kept walking like I had somewhere to be and had been heading there the whole time.

I found out from Bex two hours later.

She appeared in the doorway of the small meeting room where I was pretending to review border notes and she came in and closed the door and sat down across from me.

“Well?” I said.

“Not expelled” she said.

I looked at her.

“He’s staying.” She folded her hands on the table. “Beta title is stripped. Temporarily, apparently. Some kind of review period. He is confined to pack grounds, can’t leave without Conrad knowing, can’t do any official Beta functions.” She paused. “But he’s here. Still a pack member.”

I sat back.

Not expelled.

Rhett had every reason. Every right. Under pack law a Beta who had maintained secret contact with a fugitive pack member for five years and concealed it from his Alpha had betrayed a fundamental trust. The pack would have accepted an expulsion. Some of them would have expected it.

He did not do it.

“Did anyone say why?” I said.

Bex shook her head. “Not officially. Kitchen got bits of it but nothing solid.” She looked at me carefully. “You seem surprised.”

“I’m not surprised” I said.

She tilted her head. “You look surprised.”

I looked at the table. The border notes I had not actually read. The lines of text blurring slightly at the edges of my focus.

I had built a version of Rhett in my head over five years. Not a bad version. Not an unfair one. Just the version I could see from where I was standing. The Alpha who watched everything from a distance. The man who made decisions with no visible emotion and filed information away and operated like every choice was a calculation.

Cold. Controlled. Transactional.

Except Marcus had hidden Dana from him for five years. Had looked Rhett in the face every single day and known and said nothing. That was not a small thing. That was not something you reviewed and paused and left a door open on.

Not if you were who I had decided Rhett was.

“He could have removed him permanently” I said out loud. More to myself than to Bex.

“He could have” Bex agreed.

“The pack would have accepted it. Some of them probably expected it.”

“Some of them did.” She was watching me. “Roy told me two of the senior wolves asked Conrad directly and Conrad gave them nothing.”

I looked at the table.

Not expelled.

The word for what Rhett had done was not mercy exactly. Mercy had a softness to it. And it was not purely strategy either, not just keeping Marcus around because a stable Beta situation looked better than a power gap. It was something in between. Something that accounted for the fact that Marcus had made a choice from love and that choices from love were a different category from choices from selfishness.

Rhett had weighed that. Had decided it mattered. Had given Marcus a door to come back through.

I did not have a word for that yet.

“You’re doing the face” Bex said.

“What face.”

“The one where you are thinking about him specifically.” She said it completely matter-of-fact. Like it was just a piece of information she was relaying. “You get a different face for pack things and a different one for Rhett things. This is the Rhett one.”

I looked at her.

She looked back. Completely unashamed.

“I don’t have a face” I said.

“Nora.” She picked up her coffee. “I have been watching you for five years. You have many faces. I have catalogued most of them.” She took a sip. “That one specifically shows up when he does something that doesn’t fit the box you put him in.”

I said nothing.

She was not wrong.

That was the most annoying part. She was sitting across from me being completely right and I had no rebuttal.

“He didn’t expel Marcus” I said finally.

“No” she said.

“That means something.”

“Yes” she said. “It does.”

She didn’t say what. Didn’t push it in any direction. Just left it sitting there on the table between us, that small plain fact, and let me do whatever I needed to do with it.

I looked at the border notes.

The version of Rhett I had built in my head had a clean shape. A clean logic. I had been using that shape to understand him for five years and it had mostly worked.

This did not fit that shape.

And I was not sure what shape it fit instead.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​