The Alpha Imposter Wife

Chapter 12: Dana Makes a Movement

NORA POV

Dana opened the door before I even knocked properly.

“I heard footsteps” she said. “I’ve been awake since four.”

“Let me in.”

She stepped back. The east guest room smelled like the lavender soap from the bathroom and the window was cracked open slightly even though it was cold. Dana was already dressed, which meant she hadn’t slept at all or had given up trying hours ago. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me with that expression she’d been wearing since she arrived. Braced.

“There’s a woman with Warren’s delegation” I said. “Her name is Petra.”

Dana’s face changed. Fast. The colour left it first and then everything went very still and I recognised that stillness immediately because I did the exact same thing when something scared me badly enough.

“You know her” I said.

“Yes.”

“How?”

Dana pressed her lips together. “She was at Ironridge. At Warren’s pack. She stayed there for a few months, maybe six, about two years before my wedding.” She looked at her hands. “Petra and Warren aren’t just allies, Nora. They’re close in a way that means whatever he knows, she knows. And whatever she’s figured out, he already has it too.”

“What has she figured out?”

“I don’t know exactly.” Dana looked up. “But if she’s here it’s not for the food.”

I sat down in the chair across from her. “She said something to me last night. In the corridor after dinner. She said the Luna role must be especially demanding for someone who didn’t grow up expecting it.”

Dana stared at me. “She said that to your face.”

“Quietly. Wrapped in a smile. But yes.”

“That’s not a guess” Dana said. “That’s not her fishing. She knows something.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Dana stood up. Started moving around the room, which was what she did when she was thinking hard, little pacing loops that I remembered from when we were teenagers. “Okay. Okay, I need to tell you something. I should have told you last night but I wasn’t ready and now I don’t have the option of waiting anymore.”

I watched her. “Tell me.”

“Warren came to me two weeks before the wedding” she said. She stopped pacing. Faced me. “He found me alone, sat across from me in a coffee shop, and told me he knew about the arrangement. About Mum’s deal with the Blackwood elders. About what the pack expected from whoever became Luna.”

“He knew about the arrangement before you even married in?”

“He had done research. A lot of it. He knew about Mum, about the pack records, about the whole thing.” She swallowed. “And then he told me what the records said. About the twin born between two faces. About what one of us was carrying.”

The room went very quiet.

“He knew about the prophecy” I said.

“He showed me documentation, Nora. Actual pages. He sat there and he explained to me that according to the old pack records, one of us was the memory wolf. That the pack would eventually figure out which twin it was. That if the wrong twin married in and it wasn’t her, the pack would feel the absence of it.”

I was watching her face very carefully now. “So he warned you.”

“He told me what would happen. And I…” She stopped. Looked at the window. “I looked at everything he showed me and I made a decision.”

Something was building in my chest. Not the pressure feeling. Something different. Hotter.

“You ran” I said.

“Yes.”

“You left that night.”

“Yes.”

I stood up slowly. “Dana. Did you know? When you knocked on my door that night in the dress and the bag and the just one week. Did you already know what I was?”

She didn’t answer immediately.

That was my answer.

“Say it” I said. “Out loud.”

“I knew” she said. Quiet. “I knew that one of us was the memory wolf and I knew that according to everything Warren showed me, it wasn’t me. It was you.” She met my eyes. “I knew what you were and I left anyway.”

The hot thing in my chest pushed outward.

Five years. Five years of waking up early and learning patrol schedules and sitting in meetings and managing a pack that was never mine and smiling at people who called me by the wrong name and carrying the weight of a life I never asked for. And my sister had known. Had known before any of it started. Had known what I was walking into and handed me the door and said one week and walked away.

“So it wasn’t just cold feet” I said. “It wasn’t just fear.”

“Nora…”

“You left me here knowing. Knowing what this pack would eventually need from me. Knowing about the prophecy. Knowing that I had no idea any of it existed.” My voice was level. I was proud of that. “You just left me here in the dark.”

“I was scared!” Her voice cracked. “I was twenty-three and I was terrified and Warren had just told me all of this and I couldn’t think straight and you were always the one who held everything together and I just…”

“Don’t” I said.

She stopped.

I held up one hand. Flat. She stopped mid-sentence and I stood there with my hand up and the room completely silent and the hot feeling in my chest pushing and pushing and I just needed her to stop talking for one second while I figured out what I was going to do with this.

She knew.

The whole five years. She knew.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​