The Alpha Imposter Wife

Chapter 20: What Judith Saw

NORA POV

“You’re not going to apologize” I said.

Judith looked at me. “No.”

“Okay.” I sat down on the wall beside her. Not close. Just on the same wall. “Then explain it.”

She was quiet for a second. Like she was deciding where to start. Then she said, “I found the records first.”

I looked at her.

“Before the Blackwoods. Before their translation. My family’s archives had an older version and I found it when I was twenty-six and I read it and I understood what it meant.” She kept her eyes on the tree line. “I went to the Blackwoods. I made the arrangement myself. I thought I was building something for my daughters. A powerful pack. Security. A future.”

“You arranged the marriage before we were even born.”

“Yes.”

“Based on a prophecy.”

“Based on what I believed was real. Still believe.” She turned to look at me. “And then you were born and I looked at you and I knew. The records said the mother would always know which twin carried it. They were right about that.”

“It was me” I said.

“From the first day.” Her voice was flat. Just stating facts. “I knew it was you and not Dana and I looked at my daughter and I thought about what the packs would do when they figured it out. What you would become to them.” She paused. “I did not want that for you.”

“So you suppressed it.”

“I spent four years finding someone who could do it. It cost me a great deal. Things I will not get into.” She looked back at the trees. “And I had it done when you were small enough that you would not remember.”

“I was a child” I said. “You made that choice for a child who had no idea what was happening.”

“Yes.”

“And you told yourself it was protection.”

“It was protection.”

“It was also control” I said.

She didn’t answer.

I looked at her face. The set of her jaw. The hands still gripping each other in her lap. She wasn’t going to argue with that. She couldn’t.

“You can’t fully separate the two” I said. “Can you.”

“No” she said quietly. “I can’t.”

The garden was cold. The emergency lights from the main house reached just far enough to put a weak edge of light across the grass. Everything beyond it was dark.

“Three weeks ago” she said. “Something changed. I was in the city and I felt it. The suppression starting to come apart.” She finally looked at me properly. “I have been watching you since then. Trying to decide whether to come and interfere or let it go.”

“You chose interfere” I said. “The note to Dana.”

“Dana being here right now is the worst possible timing.”

“Why?”

“Because when the thread fully wakes, it takes what you are feeling and it sends it outward.” She turned to face me on the wall. “It doesn’t filter. It doesn’t choose. Whatever is in you, the pack feels it too. Fear. Anger. Courage.” She held my eyes. “Grief.”

I went still.

“If the thread wakes while you are grieving what Dana did, while you are still raw from it, the pack feels that grief too.” Her voice was careful. Controlled. “Grief in a pack is not just sadness, Nora. It destabilises them. It makes them uncertain. And an uncertain pack in the middle of a Warren Steele situation is a dangerous one.”

I sat with that.

“So you wanted her gone” I said. “Not because of her baby. Because of me.”

“Both are true.”

“But mainly because of me.”

She didn’t deny it.

I stood up. Moved a few steps away and stood with my back to her for a second. The cold was hitting the back of my neck and the grass under my boots was wet and I just needed a moment to stand still and breathe.

My mother had found the prophecy. Had made the arrangement. Had known which twin I was from the first day of my life. Had spent four years arranging to have something fundamental locked inside me without ever once asking, as I got older, if I deserved to know about it.

And now she was here, on these grounds, watching me from a distance and sliding notes under doors.

I turned back around.

“Did you ever plan to tell me?” I said. “Any of it. Ever.”

She opened her mouth.

The alarm went off.

Not the normal pack bell. This was different. Louder. A real alarm, the kind that meant actual threat, not a drill, not a test, and it came from the direction of the main house and hit the night air like something breaking.

Judith was on her feet before I fully processed it.

My head snapped toward the tree line.

The east tree line. Rhett’s tree line. The one he stood at every morning at five and stared into. The one he had been watching for five years like it owed him something.

Something was moving in it.

Not one thing. Multiple. Dark shapes between the trees, low and fast, the kind of movement that did not look like patrol wolves. It looked like something coming in. Something that had been waiting for the right moment.

My chest slammed.

“Nora!” Judith grabbed my arm.

“Let go…”

“You are on the wrong side of the grounds!”

I pulled free. Already moving. The main house was across the full width of the property and the alarm was still going and I could hear wolves shifting now, that sound, the low collective rumble of a pack responding to a threat.

Rhett was at the main house.

Dana was at the main house.

And whatever he had been watching for at that tree line every single morning for five years had just arrived.

I ran.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​