The Alpha's Fake Girlfriend

The Verification

Yara arrived at the pack house's east study just after nine, summoned by a message that gave no hint of what waited for her. She found Alaric standing by the window, Cassian seated near the cold fireplace, and Seraphina perched on the edge of a chair with her arms crossed tight over her chest, exhaustion still etched deep into every line of her face despite the few hours of restless sleep she'd managed. The morning light filtering through the tall windows felt almost cruel in its ordinariness, indifferent to everything that had unraveled inside this house overnight.

"You wanted to see me, Alpha?" Yara's eyes moved across the room, reading the tension immediately, her healer's instincts clearly picking up on something wrong before anyone said a word, her gaze lingering a moment too long on the closed door behind her.

"Sit down, Yara." Alaric's voice was gentle, but there was no mistaking the weight behind it. "We need to ask you some questions, and I need you to understand this isn't an accusation. It's a precaution the Council has required of everyone with access to last night's discoveries, and I wouldn't put you through it if I had any other choice."

Yara's expression shifted, wariness sliding into something more guarded, her hands folding together in front of her like a woman bracing for bad news. "This is about the archive."

"It's about the Accord," Cassian said quietly. "About who might have helped them find their way back into pack business after twenty-two years of silence."

Yara sat slowly, folding her hands in her lap, and for a long moment she said nothing at all, staring at some fixed point on the floor as though gathering herself for a conversation she'd clearly been dreading for longer than anyone in the room realized, her shoulders squared like someone preparing to defend a lifetime's worth of quiet service.

"I've worked for this family since before you were born, Alaric," she said finally, voice quiet but steady, though something beneath it trembled faintly. "I delivered you. I treated your father through his final illness. I've kept every secret this pack has ever asked me to keep, and I've never once betrayed that trust, not for money, not for fear, not for anything anyone could have offered me."

"I believe you," Alaric said, crossing the room to sit across from her, his posture softening from Alpha into something closer to the man she'd clearly known his entire life. "But I need more than belief right now. I need proof, the same way I needed proof from Cassian last night before I trusted a single word he said, even after everything he'd already risked to bring it to me."

Something in Yara's posture eased slightly at that, as though the fairness of the comparison mattered to her more than the accusation itself had stung. "Ask what you need to ask. I have nothing to hide from any of you."

Seraphina leaned forward. "Three years ago, activity around my bloodline resumed, according to Delphine. Quiet inquiries into sealed records. You've had access to sealed medical files for decades. Did anyone approach you during that time? Anyone asking questions about old suppression markers, old sealing rituals, anything connected to what we found last night?"

Yara's jaw tightened, and for a moment Seraphina thought she saw genuine hesitation cross the healer's face, the kind of hesitation that came from someone deciding how much of an old, complicated truth to finally let out into the light.

"Three years ago, a woman came to me claiming to represent an independent research consortium studying rare shifter genetics." Yara's frown deepened further as the memory surfaced fully. "She offered a substantial donation to the healer's guild in exchange for anonymized data on historical suppression cases. I refused her outright. It felt wrong the moment she asked, though I couldn't have told you exactly why at the time, only that something about her manner set every instinct in me on edge."

"Do you remember her name?" Alaric asked, leaning forward now, sharp attention replacing the gentleness from moments earlier, his whole body suddenly still in the way Seraphina had learned meant he was bracing for something painful.

"She gave one. I doubt it was real, given everything about the encounter felt rehearsed." Yara frowned, reaching back through years of memory, her eyes distant. "Renata Voss."

The name landed in the room like a struck bell. Alaric went very still, color draining slowly from his face, and for a moment Seraphina thought he might not speak at all.

"Voss," he repeated, the word barely more than breath. "That's not a common name in this pack outside my own direct line. Not one you'd expect a stranger to invent by accident."

"I assumed it was coincidence at the time. A stolen name, maybe, meant to sound legitimate enough to open doors." Yara's frown deepened. "I never reported it because nothing came of the conversation. She left when I refused her, and I never heard from her again. I didn't think it mattered."

"It matters now," Cassian said grimly, sitting forward in his chair. "Because if someone used our family name to open doors with pack healers three years ago, right around the time the Accord resurfaced according to Delphine's own report, that's not coincidence. That's someone inside this family, or close enough to it, laundering their access through a fake identity everyone would trust without question."

Seraphina watched Alaric process the implication, watched the exhaustion and grief of the last twenty-four hours compound into something heavier, more personal than anything they'd uncovered so far tonight. "My mother had a sister," he said slowly, the words dragged out of him like something physically painful to admit. "She died young, before I was born. I never met her. I only know her from old photographs and the occasional mention at family gatherings, always brief, always uncomfortable, like a subject everyone had silently agreed not to explore too deeply."

"What was her name?" Seraphina asked, though some part of her already suspected the answer before he even spoke it aloud, dread pooling low and cold in her stomach.

"Renata," Alaric said. "Renata Voss."

The room went completely silent, the weight of the revelation settling over all four of them at once, thick enough that Seraphina could hear her own pulse hammering in her ears. "You said she died before you were born. Are you absolutely certain of that, or is it simply what you were always told to believe?"

"I was always told she died young. I never questioned it. Why would I have?" Alaric's voice had gone hollow, disbelief and dawning horror warring across his features. "If she's alive, if she's been alive this entire time, using her own name to approach healers under a false pretense—"

"Then someone in your own family faked her death decades ago," Cassian finished, leaning forward with grim intensity, "and has been operating in the shadows of this pack ever since, exactly the kind of long game the Ashwood Accord would need someone loyal, patient, and invisible enough to run without ever being caught."

Yara looked between them, visibly shaken by the direction the conversation had taken without her full understanding of it. "I only know what I told you. I never saw her again after that single meeting. I have no proof beyond a stolen name and a bad feeling I never acted on."

"You've given us more than proof," Alaric said quietly, some of the color slowly returning to his face as the shock gave way to grim resolve. "You've given us a name to search for. That's more than we had an hour ago, and more than we've managed to uncover in three months of chasing shadows." He turned to Cassian. "I want every archive record connected to Renata Voss pulled immediately. Birth certificate, death certificate, any medical or Council filing bearing her name, going back forty years if necessary, cross-referenced against anything Delphine's intelligence report might have missed."

"And if her death certificate turns out to be forged?" Seraphina asked, already anticipating the answer even as she said it.

"Then we'll know the Ashwood Accord didn't need to recruit anyone from outside this family at all," Alaric said, jaw tight with a fury Seraphina hadn't seen from him even in the worst moments of last night. "They already had someone waiting inside it, patient enough to disappear for thirty years and wait for exactly this moment to resurface, close enough to the family to move freely without ever raising suspicion."

Yara rose slowly from her chair, still visibly shaken by everything the last few minutes had unearthed. "If there's anything else I can do, anything at all, you have only to ask. I owe this family more than a single afternoon of questions."

"There is one thing." Alaric's expression softened slightly as he looked at her. "Keep this conversation between the four of us for now. If Renata is who we suspect, and if she still has eyes inside this house, we can't afford to let her know how close we've already come."