The Alpha Imposter Wife

Chapter 41: The Pack Starts Talking

NORA POV

“It’s moving” Bex said.

She sat down across from me at the lunch table and did not pick up her fork. That was how I knew it was serious. Bex always picked up her fork first.

“What exactly?” I said. Kept my voice normal. Picked up my own fork like we were just talking.

“The visiting relative” she said quietly. “The face thing. Some of the older wolves have been looking at her and looking at you and putting it together.” She glanced down the table to make sure nobody was close enough. “Kade said something to Mira this morning. I didn’t hear all of it but I heard the word twin.”

I chewed. Swallowed. Picked up my glass.

“How many people?” I said.

“I don’t know. More than yesterday.” She looked at me carefully. “It’s not loud yet. Nobody is saying anything openly. But it is moving.”

“Okay.”

“That’s it? Okay?”

“What do you want me to say, Bex?”

“I want you to say something that tells me you have a plan for when it stops being quiet and starts being loud.” She kept her voice low. “Because that is coming. Today or tomorrow or the day after, someone is going to say it out loud in a room instead of in a corner and then it will not be a rumour anymore.”

I looked at my plate.

She was right. I knew she was right. The story had been holding on borrowed time since Dana walked through the east gate and borrowed time had a habit of running out at the worst possible moment.

“I know” I said.

“Nora—”

“I know, Bex.” I looked at her. “I am working on it.”

She held my eyes for a second. Then she picked up her fork.

The morning had already been off before Bex said any of that.

Breakfast had felt different. Not wrong exactly. Just that small shift, the one I had been learning to read since the delegation left. A fraction more careful in how certain wolves looked at me. A fraction more watchful in how they moved when I came into a room.

Two senior wolves in the corridor near the pack hall had stopped talking when I came around the corner. They had said good morning and stepped aside and kept their faces completely right. Professional. Normal.

They had also not been talking about anything work-related. I could tell by the way they stepped apart. Slightly too quick. The specific gap that opened when people who were talking about you had to suddenly pretend they weren’t.

I had said good morning back and kept walking.

The border management meeting in the afternoon took two hours and I sat through all of it and handled every question and made every decision and nobody in that room showed anything directly on their face. But I felt it. The way certain eyes moved to me just a fraction too often. The way one of the wolves near the end of the table kept glancing at the door like she was thinking about something outside the room.

After the meeting I walked to the bathroom at the end of the corridor.

Closed the door. Locked it.

Turned the tap on. Cold water on my hands.

Then I gripped the edge of the sink and just stood there.

Breathed.

The bathroom was small. White tiles. The tap still running. My face in the mirror above the sink looked like someone who had been performing all day and had finally found a room where the performance could stop for thirty seconds.

The pack was not going to hold.

Not the story. Not the quiet. Not the careful management that had kept everything together since Dana walked back through the gate. I could feel both of those things the same way I could feel the pressure in my chest. They were real and they were close and the countdown had stopped being something I could calculate from a distance.

It was here.

Not tomorrow. Not next week.

Now.

I turned the tap off. Dried my hands. Looked at my face in the mirror.

Dana’s face. My face. The same face that certain wolves in this pack were now comparing to a woman in the east guest room and quietly working something out.

I had been in this pack for five years and I had learned every one of them. I knew who would accept the truth and feel betrayed but stay. I knew who would feel betrayed and leave. I knew who would not accept it at all.

I had been running the numbers in my head since the morning the alarm went off and every version of those numbers told me the same thing.

This had to come from me. Not from Warren. Not from a rumour reaching the right ears at the wrong moment. From me, directly, in a controlled setting, before the choice was taken out of my hands.

Tonight. The wolf.

And then the pack.

In that order because it had to be in that order. Because whatever I was going to say to sixty wolves about who I actually was, I needed to be whole when I said it. Not halfway. Not still locked up and pushing things back down. Whole.

I unlocked the bathroom door.

Bex was in the corridor. She was not pretending she was doing something else this time. She was just standing there waiting.

“I’m fine” I said.

“You were in there for seven minutes” she said.

“That’s allowed.”

“Seven minutes with the tap running.” She fell into step beside me. “Nobody runs the tap for seven minutes, Nora.”

I walked. She walked with me.

“The plan is almost ready” I said. Not fully true. Not fully a lie. “I just need tonight.”

“Tonight for what?”

I looked at her sideways. “Something I have to do alone.”

She looked back at me. The Bex look. The one where she was deciding how much to push.

“Is it dangerous?” she said.

I thought about August’s answer to the same question. I don’t know. I cannot make you a promise about pain.

“No” I said.

She held my gaze. “You hesitated.”

“I didn’t hesitate.”

“You took a breath before you said no.”

“Bex.”

“Okay.” She stopped walking. I stopped too. She looked at me straight. “Whatever you are doing tonight. When it is done and you are on the other side of it.” She pointed at me. “You come find me before you do anything else.”

“Why?”

“Because I have been watching something build in you for a week and I don’t know what it is and I will not sleep until I know you are still standing after it.” She dropped her hand. “That is a non-negotiable.”

I looked at her.

This girl. My pack. The one I hadn’t chosen and couldn’t imagine not having.

“Okay” I said.

“Before anyone else. Me first.”

“Okay, Bex.”

She nodded. Started walking again.

Behind us somewhere in the house, voices. Normal pack sounds. Evening settling in.

The rumour moving through it like water through cracks.

I could not stop it now.

I could only decide how I met it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​