The Alpha Imposter Wife

Chapter 9: Roy's Piece

NORA POV

"You said you should have told me a year ago" I said. "So tell me now."

Roy was still sitting in the chair by the window, elbows on his knees, looking at the floor. He nodded slowly. Like he was settling something in himself first.

Roy Blackwood was not a quiet person. That was the thing. He was the one who walked into rooms and made them lighter, the one with the easy jokes and the laugh that came too fast and too loud. Tonight there was none of that. No jokes. No deflecting. Just this heavy, careful version of him sitting in my chair and it was genuinely unsettling.

"Three years ago" he started. "Before you came here. Before any of this."

"Okay."

"I was sixteen. Couldn't sleep, I was going through a phase where I just didn't sleep properly, I used to wander the house at night." He glanced up. "You know the east corridor on the ground floor? Near August's rooms?"

"Yes."

"I heard voices. It was like two in the morning so I slowed down because that was weird, right. August's door wasn't fully closed. I could hear him and I could hear a woman." He stopped. Looked at his hands. "It took me a few minutes to figure out who she was but when she said her daughters' names I knew."

My stomach dropped. "My mother."

"Judith Cole. Yeah." He exhaled slowly. "She wasn't supposed to be there. Nobody knew she was there, I'm pretty sure. She came in the middle of the night and she went straight to August and I stood outside that door for like twenty minutes and I heard enough."

"What did you hear?"

He sat back. "The word suppressed came up a lot. And prophecy. And your name. Not Dana's. Yours specifically." He met my eyes. "Whatever the conversation was about, it was about something your mother did to you when you were little. Something she did and August was furious about it. I had never heard him angry before. Not like that."

"What did she suppress?" I asked. My voice came out flat but my hands on my knees were pressing down hard.

"I don't know" Roy said. "I couldn't hear all of it and the parts I did hear I didn't fully understand back then. I was sixteen. I just knew suppressed and prophecy and your name and August telling her in this really quiet, really cold voice that what she had done was not supposed to be possible." He paused. "Like it wasn't just hard to do. Like it shouldn't have been doable at all."

The room felt smaller suddenly. I made myself breathe normally.

"Why didn't you tell Rhett?" I asked.

Roy laughed once, short and humourless. "I was sixteen and I had just overheard something I wasn't supposed to and I didn't fully understand what it meant. And then by the time I was old enough to actually think it through—" He spread his hands. "You were already here. Already Dana. The whole thing was already so complicated and I kept thinking I'd wait for the right time to bring it up and the right time just never came."

"A year" I said. "You said a year ago."

"A year ago is when I connected some things and realised it was more serious than I'd let myself believe." He looked at me steadily. "I'm sorry. I should have said something sooner."

I didn't tell him it was fine because it wasn't fine. But I also couldn't be angry at him, not really, because he was here now and he was telling me and that counted for something.

"What prophecy?" I asked. "Do you know any details?"

Roy shook his head. "Just that it existed and that August knew it and that it had something to do with you. The specifics I never got." He hesitated. "August will know. Whatever your mother came to him about that night, he'll know all of it."

I sat with that. August Holt. The pack elder who moved slowly and said little and always seemed to be somewhere nearby without being in the way. I had spoken to him maybe twenty times in five years, normal Luna things, nothing that ever felt significant.

Apparently he had been sitting on something very significant the whole time.

And then I thought about the feeling. The one I had been writing off for years as anxiety, as stress, as just my body reacting to the pressure of everything. That deep pressure in my chest, low and strange, like something pushing against the inside of my ribs. It came when I was very scared. It came when I was very angry. It had been coming more often lately and I had been ignoring it.

Suppressed.

Whatever that word meant in the context of my mother and August and a prophecy nobody had told me about.

"Why are you telling me this now?" I asked. "Tonight specifically."

Roy looked at me like he thought that was obvious. "Dana's back. Marcus just walked in and admitted five years of secret contact to my brother's face. Warren Steele has your personal phone number." He tilted his head. "Everything is converging on this house right now and you're in the middle of all of it and I didn't want you to be the only person standing in the middle of it who didn't know something was converging."

I stared at him.

He shrugged, a little awkward. "You've been running this place for five years. You deserve to know what you're actually running it in the middle of."

Something in my chest went tight in a completely different way than the pressure feeling. This was just. Plain human tightness. The kind that came from someone being unexpectedly decent when you weren't prepared for it.

"Thank you" I said. And I meant it.

He stood up, stretched once, and moved toward the door. Back to looking more like himself. "Get some sleep" he said. "I know you won't but try anyway."

He left. I sat in the quiet he left behind.

Suppressed. Prophecy. August knowing. My mother sneaking here in the middle of the night two years before I ever set foot in this pack.

I didn't know what to do with any of it. Not tonight.

I got up and turned off the lamp and stood at the window because I always ended up at the window eventually. The grounds were dark and still. Cold looking even through the glass.

And then I saw him.

Rhett. Standing at the far edge of the grounds near the east tree line, completely still, hands loose at his sides, facing the trees. No jacket. Just standing there in the dark like he had somewhere to be and the somewhere was right there.

I had seen him do this a hundred times. Five years of early mornings, five a.m. when I couldn't sleep, and I would look out this window and he would be there. Facing those trees. Not moving. Just watching.

I had always assumed it was a morning thing. An Alpha thing. Some patrol habit he never switched off.

But it was nearly midnight.

He was standing at the east tree line at midnight and I suddenly understood, in a way I hadn't before, that this wasn't habit. He wasn't doing this because it was morning and it was routine. He was doing it because he was watching for something. Had been watching for something for a very long time.

Five years of five a.m. and now midnight too.

And I had never once asked him why.