The Alpha Imposter Wife

Chapter 10: August Holt

NORA POV

"I was wondering when you'd come" August said without turning around.

He was crouched near the low rosemary hedge at the far end of the eastern garden, pressing the soil around the base of something I didn't know the name of. The morning was cold and grey and smelled like wet dirt and whatever was growing in the beds nearest the wall. He didn't look up when I walked across the grass toward him. Just kept working with his hands like I had all the time in the world to wait.

I stopped a few feet away. "You were expecting me?"

"Eventually." He stood up slowly. Brushed the dirt off his palms. Then he looked at me and his face did that thing it sometimes did, that look that wasn't quite recognition but was something close to it, like he was seeing more than just my face. "Sit down if you want. Or stand. It doesn't matter."

There was a low stone bench nearby. I sat. He stayed standing, which felt deliberate.

"Three years ago" I said. "My mother came here. In the middle of the night. She talked to you."

August didn't flinch. Didn't look away. "Yes."

"About me."

"Yes."

"About something she did when I was a child." I kept my voice even. "And about a prophecy."

He was quiet. And it wasn't the quiet of someone deciding whether to talk. I had seen that kind of quiet enough in this pack to know the difference. This was slower. Heavier. The quiet of someone figuring out which words were the right ones for something they had been carrying for a long time.

I waited.

"There are old pack records" he said finally. "Older than Blackwood Pack. Older than most of the packs in this region." He moved to the bench and sat beside me, not close, but close enough that his voice stayed low. "One of those records describes a wolf born between two faces. A twin birth where one child carries something the records call the memory wolf."

"What does that mean?"

"It doesn't mean a wolf with a good memory." He looked at his hands. "It means a wolf whose presence stays with the people around her. Other wolves can't forget her. She changes the feeling of a pack just by being in it. Fear gets sharper near her. Courage gets steadier. Loyalty goes deeper." He paused. "It radiates. She doesn't control it, she just is it, and everyone around her feels it whether they understand it or not."

I stared at him. "You're saying I'm that wolf."

"Yes."

"And my mother figured that out."

"Your mother is not a stupid woman" he said. Not unkindly. Just straight. "She found the records before the Blackwoods did. She came to me and asked if what she had read was real and I told her it was. And then she asked me if it could be locked away." He looked at me directly. "I told her no. That it wasn't possible. That what a wolf carries in her nature cannot be removed."

"But she found someone who said yes" I said slowly.

"She found someone who said yes." His jaw moved slightly. "And whatever they did, it held. Twenty-four years is extraordinary. I have never seen a suppression hold that long."

Twenty-four years. My whole life. Something in me that was supposed to be there, that was apparently always supposed to be there, locked away since before I was old enough to know it existed.

"Is that what I've been feeling?" I asked. "For years there's been this pressure in my chest, this…" I pressed my hand flat against my sternum without meaning to. "Like something pushing from the inside. I always thought it was anxiety."

August looked at my hand on my chest. "It's been waking up. Slowly, for about two years now. I've been watching it." He said it so calmly, like watching something that was locked inside me slowly break free was just a thing you monitored and noted. "The suppression is weakening."

"What happens when it fully wakes up?" I asked.

He was quiet again. This time I didn't think it was word-choosing quiet. I thought it was I genuinely don't fully know quiet, which was somehow worse.

"The records are old" he said. "The language is difficult. But based on what I understand, it won't be subtle. The people around you will feel it before you do." He met my eyes. "It might be frightening for them if they don't know what it is."

"Then tell them!" I said. "Tell me! You've been watching this for two years and you've said nothing…"

"Because the prophecy says you have to choose it" he said. Firm but not unkind. "Not be told into it. Not pushed into it by someone else deciding it's time. You have to come to it yourself and you have to know what you're choosing when you do." He held my stare. "If I had come to you two years ago and said here is what you are, here is what is happening to you, here is what you need to do, that wouldn't be a choice. That would just be another person deciding your life for you."

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

He wasn't wrong. I hated that he wasn't wrong.

"And now?" I asked. "Is it still my choice if you're telling me right now?"

"You came to me" he said simply. "That's different."

I sat with that for a minute. The garden around us was just a garden, cold morning air and damp soil and a few birds doing ordinary bird things in the hedges. Normal. Quiet. Nothing about it looked like the kind of place where someone told you that you had been carrying a locked-up wolf your whole life and it was getting ready to wake up.

I left August in the garden and went through the rest of the day the way I went through most days, meeting to meeting, keeping my face doing the right things, keeping my voice steady. But something was different now and I could feel it. Every time that pressure moved in my chest I noticed it instead of writing it off. Every time it shifted I paid attention.

By evening it was stronger than it had been that morning.

I was walking back from the pack hall after the last meeting of the day, cutting across the grounds in the grey evening light, when it hit me harder than it ever had before. Not painful. Not scary exactly. Just suddenly and completely there, pushing against my ribs from the inside, strong enough that I actually stopped walking and pressed my hand against my sternum.

"Okay" I said out loud, very quietly. "Okay, I feel you."

The pressure pushed back. Like it heard me. Like it was answering.

I stood very still on the path.

And then across the grounds, maybe thirty feet away near the edge of the training yard, a wolf I didn't recognise stopped walking. Just stopped. Mid-step. And turned its head and looked directly at me.

Not at the path. Not at the house behind me. At me.

It stood there for a long moment, completely still, eyes locked on mine, and I felt the pressure in my chest pulse once, hard, and the wolf took one step toward me before it caught itself and stopped.

August had said the people around me would feel it before I did.

I was starting to think he meant right now.