The Alpha Imposter Wife

Chapter 39: Rhett Asks Her Again

NORA POV

The east steps were cold.

I had been sitting on them for maybe twenty minutes. Not planning to. Just ended up there because inside the house had too many walls and too many people doing careful things with their faces and I needed to be somewhere the ceiling wasn’t right above my head.

The grounds were quiet. Evening settling in, that flat grey light going darker at the edges. A patrol wolf crossing the far path. The tree line sitting still.

I heard the door behind me.

Rhett sat down beside me. Not asking. Just sat. Close enough that his arm was near mine but not touching. He looked at the grounds the same way I was looking at them and didn’t say anything.

We sat like that for a minute. Maybe two.

Then he said, “What do you want?”

I turned to look at him.

He was still looking at the grounds. Profile to me. That jaw. That stillness that had its own weight.

“Not the plan” he said. “Not what happens next with Warren or the wolf or the pack gathering. I am not asking about any of that.” He turned his head and looked at me. “What do you actually want?”

The question sat in the cold air.

I opened my mouth. Then I closed it.

He waited.

“I don’t know” I said.

“Okay.”

“I mean it. I genuinely don’t know.” I looked back at the grounds. “For five years everything has been about managing. Keeping the lie going. Learning the pack, handling the meetings, making sure nothing cracked.” I pressed my hands together on my knees. “It was not about what I wanted. It was about what the situation needed.”

“And before that?”

“Before this I was no one in particular.” I said it flat. “I was Dana’s sister. The one who held things together. The one who said yes when she needed someone to say yes.” I looked at the tree line. “I don’t think I spent a lot of time asking myself what I wanted before either.”

Rhett was quiet for a moment.

“Then it sounds like you have an answer” he said.

I looked at him. “What?”

“You said you don’t know what you want because everything has been about survival and management.” He held my eyes. “That is an answer. Just not the kind you were expecting to give.”

“That’s not an answer, that’s a problem.”

“It is both” he said simply.

I stared at him.

“You have been so busy being Dana” he said, “that you do not know yet who Nora is.”

The words landed clean and flat. No edge in them. No judgment. No pity. Just the fact of it sitting there in the space between us like he had been watching it for five years and had finally found the right moment to say it out loud.

My chest did something. Not the pressure. Something different. Something smaller and sharper in a specific place.

“You say that like it’s simple” I said.

“I say it like it’s true” he said. “Those are not the same thing.”

I looked at my hands on my knees.

Five years. Five years of Dana’s name and Dana’s life and Dana’s room and Dana’s pack and Dana’s husband who sat beside me on cold stone steps and said things that cut straight to the middle of whatever I was carrying without making me feel like he was cutting.

I had not thought of him as Dana’s husband in a long time.

I did not examine that right now.

“You have been watching that for five years” I said. “Watching me not know who I was.”

“I have been watching you figure out who you were by doing the work” he said. “The Luna work. The pack work. You did not know what you wanted but you knew what the pack needed and you gave it to them.” He paused. “That is not nothing.”

“But it is not the same thing.”

“No” he said. “It is not the same thing.”

The evening was getting darker properly now. The patrol wolf had looped back around. Somewhere inside the house a door closed.

“August says tonight” I said.

Rhett looked at me.

“The wolf.” I kept my voice even. “He says the window is tonight. If I wait past tonight I lose the choice.”

He was quiet.

“I know” I said before he could say anything. “I know you want to be there. He said not before. Just me.” I looked at him sideways. “After. He said I could tell you after.”

Rhett held my eyes for a moment. I could see him working through it. The part of him that wanted to argue with not before. The part of him that understood why.

“Are you ready?” he said.

“No.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t think ready is coming in time” I said. “So I am going to do it anyway.”

He looked at me for a long moment.

“What do you want?” he said again. Quiet. Not the pack question. Not the wolf question. The actual one.

I looked at him.

His face in the evening light. Those grey eyes doing the thing where they held steady on mine without blinking. That jaw. That specific stillness that had stopped feeling like distance somewhere in the past few weeks and had started feeling like the opposite of distance.

Five years of waking up in this house.

Five years of his footsteps at five in the morning and his voice in meetings and his coffee going black without anyone having to ask and the way he said her name that first night in the study, my name, like he had been holding it carefully somewhere and was finally letting it have a place to land.

I wanted to know who Nora was.

I wanted to know what she looked like when nobody needed anything from her.

I wanted to find out if the thing sitting in my chest every time Rhett said together was something real or just five years of proximity doing something strange to my sense of what was normal.

But I did not say any of that.

“I’ll tell you” I said instead. “When I know.”

He nodded. Once.

“Fair” he said.

We sat on the cold steps for another few minutes and neither of us spoke and the grounds went darker and the tree line became just a shape and the house behind us was warm and full of people who were living inside a truth they did not fully know yet.

Tonight.

I pressed my hand against my sternum.

The pressure pushed back. Patient. Waiting.

It had been waiting twenty-four years.

It could wait a few more hours.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​