The Alpha Imposter Wife

Chapter 3: What He Already Knows

NORA POV

"I need ten minutes" I told Conrad at the bottom of the stairs. "Is he in his office?"

Conrad looked at me the way he always looked at me, like he was doing a quick calculation behind his eyes. "Yes. He has a call at eleven."

"I'll be done before eleven."

I had been running through what to say for two days. Two days of normal meals and normal meetings and sleeping badly and staring at the ceiling and going over it again. I needed a reason to bring up Dana that wasn't the actual reason. What I landed on was correspondence. Old letters, things that came in under Dana's name before I got here, stuff that technically needed the real Luna's attention.

It was thin. But it was something.

I knocked once and pushed the office door open.

Rhett was at his desk. He looked up when I came in and something shifted in his expression, too quick to name, and then he said it before I could open my mouth.

"I think we should talk about what's actually going on."

My stomach dropped so fast I felt it in my knees.

I kept my face still. I was good at that. "Okay" I said, like that sentence hadn't just turned my blood cold. "What do you mean?"

He leaned back in his chair and looked at me steadily. "Warren Steele. You know who he is?"

Warren Steele. Not me. Not the lie. Warren Steele.

The relief was so fast and so sharp it was almost embarrassing. I sat down in the chair across from his desk before my legs could do anything stupid. "The Ironridge Alpha" I said. "Yes."

"He's made two inquiries in the past month" Rhett said. "Informal ones. Through third parties. Both of them were about Blackwood's Luna."

"About me?"

"About your background. Your history before Blackwood." He paused. "Your family."

I kept my hands flat on my thighs under the desk. Still. Completely still. "What kind of inquiries?"

"The kind someone makes when they're building a picture of something." He was watching my face. I could feel it even when I wasn't looking directly at him. "He's not making threats. Not yet. But the pattern of what he's asking suggests he thinks there's something worth looking into."

"And is there?" The words came out before I fully decided to say them.

Rhett tilted his head slightly. Just a fraction. Like something I said landed differently than expected and he was filing it away.

"That's what I'm trying to figure out" he said.

There it was. Right there. I held eye contact and breathed normally and did not let a single thing show on my face and inside I was having a very loud conversation with myself about what exactly he meant by that.

Was he asking if there was something to find? Was he asking me to tell him? Was this him giving me an opening?

Or was it exactly what it sounded like, an Alpha trying to understand a threat and thinking out loud?

"Has he approached any of the pack members directly?" I asked.

"Not that I know of. Conrad's monitoring it." He looked back down at the folder on his desk. "I wanted you aware. If anyone reaches out to you directly, I need to know immediately."

"Of course" I said.

"And if you remember anything about interactions with Ironridge before you came here, anything that seemed odd at the time, it would be useful."

Before I came here. He said it like that. Before you came here. Normal. Easy.

"I'll think about it" I said.

The conversation ended. Clean, professional, nothing I couldn't handle. I stood up and pushed the chair back and told myself I had gotten through it fine. I was almost at the door.

"Dana."

I stopped.

He said my sister's name and something in my chest did a strange wrong thing, like a sound played at the wrong pitch, and I turned around slowly.

He was looking at me. Not at the folder. Not at his laptop. At me. And his expression was doing nothing I could read which was the most unsettling version of his face.

"Whatever you're carrying" he said. Level. Unbothered. Like the words cost him zero effort. "You don't have to carry it alone. Not in this pack."

That was it. That was all he said. And then he looked back down at his papers like he hadn't just said something that hit me square in the sternum.

I left.

I got four steps into the hallway and stopped walking. My hands were shaking. Not badly. Just a small tremor, fingers to palms, the kind that happens when your body decides to react before your brain gives it permission.

I pressed them flat against my thighs and stood there in the empty corridor and tried to work out what just happened.

It wasn't fear. That much I knew. I had felt fear plenty in this house, in this life, and it felt nothing like this. Fear was cold and sharp and made everything go fast. This was something else. Slower. Heavier. The kind of feeling that sits in your chest and doesn't have a clean name.

Whatever you're carrying, you don't have to carry it alone.

He said it to Dana. He thought he was saying it to Dana. He didn't know that the person standing in his office had been carrying the weight of Dana's entire existence for five years and that nobody, not one single person in this pack, knew what that actually cost.

And still. Still it did something.

I got upstairs. Changed out of the clothes I'd been in since morning. Sat on the edge of the bed and just breathed for a minute. Outside the window the afternoon was going grey, clouds moving in from the west, and the grounds looked cold and flat and nothing like the kind of place where anything good happens.

My phone was on the nightstand.

I looked at it for a long time before I picked it up.

Dana's number. Again. A new message, sent twenty minutes ago while I was in Rhett's office not falling apart.

I opened it.

It was a location. Just a pin, dropped right on the east gate of the Blackwood Pack grounds.

And under it, four words.

Tomorrow. Dawn. I'll be there.

I sat very still.

She wasn't texting from some other city. She wasn't far away, thinking about coming back, working up to it slowly. She was already close enough to drop a pin on my gate. Close enough that she knew the east gate specifically, not just the general address, the specific entrance that the pack used for quiet arrivals.

Tomorrow at dawn.

I had one night. One night to decide what I was going to do when my sister showed up at the door of the life I had been living in her name and I still didn't know if I was going to let her in or tell her to turn around and go back to wherever she had been for five years.

I put the phone down.

Picked it up again.

Stared at that pin on the map.

The east gate. Tomorrow. Dawn.

I had one night and I had no idea what I was going to do with it.