The Alpha Imposter Wife

Chapter 36: Dana and Marcus

NORA POV

Marcus was on the floor.

Not standing. Not pacing. Sitting on the corridor floor outside Dana’s room with his back flat against the wall and his knees up and his eyes on the opposite wall. Like he had sat down for a minute and then just stayed there.

He looked up when he heard me coming.

Neither of us said anything for a second.

“How long have you been out here?” I said.

“A while.”

“She knows you’re there?”

“Yes.”

I looked at the closed door. Then at him. He looked like someone who had made a decision to be in a specific place and was not moving from it and had also accepted that it was a slightly ridiculous place to be and did not care.

I stepped past him and knocked twice and pushed Dana’s door open.

She was sitting up against the headboard with a book open in her lap that she was clearly not reading. Her eyes went straight to the door when I came in. Not to me. To the door. Checking the corridor behind me.

I closed it.

“He’s still there” I said.

She looked back down at the book. “I know.”

I sat in the chair by the window. The afternoon light was flat and grey through the glass. Dana had the small lamp on and it made the room feel warmer than it was.

“Has he been there long?” I said.

“A while.” Same answer Marcus gave me. “He knocked once, about two hours ago. I didn’t open the door. He didn’t leave.”

I looked at her.

“Are you okay with him being there?”

She was quiet.

“Dana.”

“I don’t know” she said. She closed the book and put it on the nightstand. “I don’t know what I’m okay with yet.” She looked at the window. “When I walked through the gate that first morning and I saw him standing in the hall. Just. Standing there.” She pressed her lips together. “Something happened.”

“Something happened” I repeated.

“I don’t have a better word for it.” She looked at me. “It has been five years and I have spent most of them trying not to think about him. I was very good at it. Mostly.” She pulled her knees up slightly. “And then I just saw him in the doorway of the main hall and all of that stopped working.”

I sat with that.

I knew what she was describing. I had a version of it sitting in my own chest every time Rhett walked into a room and said something that did not fit the box I had built for him.

I was not going to say that out loud.

“He is not Beta anymore” I said instead. “Not officially. Not right now.”

“I know.” She looked at her hands. “Bex told me.”

“Dana, when this all comes out publicly, and it will come out, you and Marcus are going to be part of what the pack has to process.” I kept my voice even. “Five years of secret contact between the Beta and a missing Luna is not a small thing for people to sit with.”

“I know.”

“They will have feelings about it.”

“Nora. I know.”

“I just want you to understand that whatever this is between you and Marcus, it is going to become a pack conversation on top of everything else that is already happening.”

She looked at me. Steady. “I know that too.”

I looked at the closed door. The corridor on the other side of it where a grown man was sitting on the floor because he had apparently decided proximity was the only thing he had to offer right now.

I stayed. Not because there was anything specific left to say. Just because I could and because Dana was sitting in that room with a book she wasn’t reading and a man she wasn’t letting in and a baby that was going to arrive in three months regardless of any of this.

We sat quietly for a while.

She asked me if I had slept.

I said not really.

She said I looked like it.

I said thank you, very helpful.

She almost smiled. Not quite. But almost.

I stayed until the flat grey light through the window started going darker and the lamp felt like the only warm thing in the room. Then I stood up and told her to eat something and she said she would and we both knew she probably wouldn’t but we let it go.

I opened the door.

Marcus was still there.

Same spot. Back against the wall. Knees up. He looked up when the door opened and then looked back down when he saw it was me and not Dana.

I stepped over his legs.

Started walking.

“I’m sorry.”

I stopped.

His voice was quiet. Not performing it. Not building up to something. Just two words into the corridor floor.

“For the five years” he said. “Watching and knowing and saying nothing.” He still wasn’t looking at me. “You deserved better than that.”

I stood with my back to him.

The corridor was empty. A lamp down the far end. The sound of the house settling somewhere above us.

He had watched me for five years. Every meeting. Every morning. Every time I stood in a room and answered to a name that wasn’t mine. He had known what I was carrying and he had said nothing. Not to hurt me. Not out of cruelty. Because he was carrying his own impossible thing and sometimes when you’re under enough weight you just cannot pick up anyone else’s.

I understood that.

I did not say it.

I did not say anything.

I stood there for two seconds with his apology sitting in the corridor air between us and then I started walking again. Past the lamp. Toward the stairs. My footsteps quiet on the floor.

The pressure in my chest pulsed once.

I kept walking.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​