The Alpha Imposter Wife

Chapter 8: Marcus

NORA POV

"Stay here" I told Dana.

She was already right behind me on the stairs. "I'm not staying anywhere."

"Dana…"

"That's not staying here energy, that's coming with you energy. Move."

I didn't have time to argue. Conrad's knock had already stopped and the voices downstairs had gone quiet and somehow the quiet was worse than the noise. I went down the rest of the stairs fast and Dana followed and we came into the main hall together.

Marcus Hale was standing in the middle of the room.

He looked rough. That was the first thing. His jacket was creased like he'd been in a car for hours and his hair was slightly off and there was something in the way he was standing, too upright, too still, like a man who had made a decision somewhere on a long road and was now standing inside the consequences of it.

His eyes found me first. Quick. And then they moved past my shoulder to Dana.

The way he looked at her.

It wasn't professional. It wasn't the way a Beta looked at anyone in his Alpha's house. It was the look of someone who had been carrying something very heavy for a very long time and was now standing in the same room as the reason for all that weight. Relief and pain and guilt, all at once, and he didn't even try to hide it.

I heard Dana make a very small sound behind me.

Rhett was standing near the far wall. Arms loose at his sides, back straight, watching all three of us with that face that gave nothing away. He hadn't moved when we came down. Hadn't said anything. Just watched.

Marcus pulled his eyes off Dana with visible effort and looked at Rhett. "I need to speak with you. Privately."

"Say it here" Rhett said.

Two words. No heat in them at all. Just a quiet wall that Marcus clearly knew better than to try climbing because he didn't even push back. He just breathed out through his nose and looked at the floor for a second.

"I've been in contact with her" he said. Not looking at anyone. Just saying it to the floor like the floor was easier. "Dana. Over the past five years. Not often. Just checking in. Making sure she was okay."

The room went very still.

He kept going, voice flat, getting through it. "Occasional messages. Sometimes a call. I didn't tell anyone. I just wanted to know she was safe." He finally looked up. Not at Rhett. At Dana. "I needed to know she was safe."

I was watching Rhett's face. I had been watching it since Marcus started talking and it had done nothing. No anger. No surprise. No tightening around the jaw. Just stillness. Total, complete stillness. The kind that sat heavier than any visible reaction because you couldn't tell what was happening underneath it.

That kind of stillness from Rhett was worse than if he had flipped the table.

"Thank you for telling me" Rhett said. Quiet. Even. "Go to your room for tonight."

Marcus nodded once. He looked at Dana one more time, just for a second, and then he walked past all of us and up the stairs and was gone.

Rhett looked at me next. Then at Dana. "Both of you as well. We'll talk tomorrow."

"Rhett…" I started.

"Tomorrow" he said. Same quiet. Same wall.

Dana touched my arm from behind. I let it go.

We went upstairs. Dana peeled off toward the east wing without a word and I went to my room and closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed and just stayed there for a minute.

Marcus knew.

That was the thing sitting in the middle of everything. Marcus had been in contact with Dana for five years, which meant Marcus had known from basically the beginning that the woman in this house calling herself Dana was not Dana. He had looked at me every single day across pack meetings and training briefings and dinner tables and he had known.

And he said nothing.

How many people knew? That was the question. Rhett knew. Marcus knew. Who else had been sitting in this house watching Nora Cole pretend to be someone she wasn't and saying nothing about it?

I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. The plaster up there had a hairline c***k running from the window to the light fitting that I had never noticed before. I noticed it now. Funny the things you saw when your brain was running out of places to go.

Five years. How many people. Who else.

Three soft knocks at my door.

Not Conrad. Conrad knocked harder, more official. This was lighter. Casual almost.

I sat up. "Yeah."

The door opened and Roy Blackwood leaned against the doorframe with his hands in his pockets. Rhett's younger brother. He had Rhett's dark hair but none of Rhett's stillness, he was always moving, always slightly loose, always with some easy expression on his face that made rooms feel less heavy.

Except tonight his expression wasn't easy. His hands were in his pockets but his shoulders were up and his eyes, when they found mine, were doing something careful that I wasn't used to seeing on him.

"Hey" he said.

"Hey" I said back. "It's late, Roy."

"I know." He didn't move from the doorframe. Didn't come in, didn't leave. Just stood there looking at me like he was working up to something. "I've been trying to figure out when to say this for about a year now and I keep deciding it's not the right time and then the right time keeps not existing so."

I felt my stomach tighten. "What is it?"

"Can I come in?"

I moved over on the bed. He came in and sat in the chair by the window instead, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and looked at the floor the way Marcus had looked at the floor downstairs and something about that made the tight feeling in my stomach worse.

"Roy."

"Yeah." He rubbed the back of his neck. Looked up. "I need to tell you something about your mother."

Everything in me went quiet.

"My mother" I said slowly.

"Judith Cole." He said it straight, no softening around it. "She came here three years ago. Not publicly. In the middle of the night. I was sixteen and couldn't sleep and I heard her talking to August Holt in the east corridor." He looked at me steadily. "I heard enough to know it was about you. Specifically about you. And about something she did when you were a kid."

My mouth was dry. "What did she do?"

Roy opened his mouth.

And then he paused. And I could see it on his face, the weight of a year of holding this, the fact that saying it out loud was going to change something that couldn't be unchanged, and he was standing right at the edge of it.

"I should have told you a year ago" he said quietly. "I'm sorry I didn't."