The Alpha's Fake Girlfriend

What the Blood Knows

The healer's wing sat beneath the pack house, a floor most wolves never saw — cold stone, humming machines, glass vials lined in rows like a hospital that had learned to keep its secrets buried.

Alaric's personal healer, Yara, steel-gray hair and sharper eyes than most Alphas, was already waiting when they arrived, a single folder open on her desk.

"Alpha." She glanced at Seraphina, then back at him, weighing something silently. "You're sure about this."

"She has every right to see it."

Yara turned the folder around slowly. Seraphina's own blood work stared back at her in columns she half-recognized from years of medical training — until her eyes reached a section marked in red ink, unfamiliar terminology crowding the margins like a language she'd never been taught.

"What exactly am I looking at?"

Yara traced a line with one steady finger. "This marker, right here — it's called a suppression signature. It only ever appears in shifters whose wolf has been deliberately sealed away. Not born without one. Sealed. Locked, on purpose, by someone with enough power to bind it that thoroughly."

"Sealed by who?"

"That's exactly the question that should frighten you more than the wolf itself." Yara's eyes flicked to Alaric, silent understanding passing between them. "Sealing a wolf isn't simple hedge-magic. It takes Elder-level binding at minimum, or—"

"Or a Moon Goddess blessing," Alaric finished quietly, like the words cost him something to say aloud.

Seraphina's hands went cold around the edges of the folder. "You think the Moon Goddess did this to me. On purpose."

"I think someone asked her to," Yara said simply. "And she doesn't grant requests like that without a reason worth hiding."

The room went silent except for the low hum of machines, and Seraphina felt the weight of twenty-five years pressing down on her all at once — every unexplained ache, every strange dream she'd dismissed as nothing, suddenly rearranging themselves into a shape she didn't recognize.

"There's something else," Yara added, glancing toward Alaric as though asking permission. "The suppression signature isn't stable. It's degrading, compared to the baseline reading we took three days ago."

"Degrading how, exactly?" Alaric's voice sharpened, all business again.

"Whatever's held her wolf sealed for twenty-five years is losing its grip." Yara closed the folder like she was shutting a door that didn't want to stay closed. "Proximity is likely accelerating it. The two of you, together — it's waking something never meant to wake this fast."

"And if it wakes too fast?" Seraphina asked, dread pooling in her stomach.

Yara didn't answer right away, which was answer enough.

They were halfway back up the stairwell, Alaric's hand hovering near her back the way it always did now, when Seraphina's phone buzzed hard against her hip. A text from the hospital. Three words that made the floor tilt violently beneath her feet.

**Elian — emergency. Come now.**

"No." She was already moving, taking the stairs two at a time, panic clawing its way up her throat. "No, no, he was stable this morning, the surgery isn't scheduled for another week, this can't be happening yet—"

Alaric caught her at the top of the stairwell, steadying her hard by both shoulders. "Breathe. Tell me exactly what's happening."

"My brother." Her voice cracked wide open, all composure gone. "Something's wrong with him. I have to go, I have to go right now, please—"

"Then we go together." He was already turning, already signaling to one of his men, his voice sharp and commanding in a way that left no room for argument. "Car. Immediately. And get Doctor Renn on the line — tell him an Alpha escort is inbound to St. Aldric's within minutes."

"You don't have to do this, Alaric—"

"I signed a contract to protect you for thirty days, Seraphina." His eyes held hers, fierce and unshaken. "That protection includes tonight. It includes him too."

The hospital corridor smelled like antiseptic and fear. Seraphina burst through the doors to find her brother's small body swallowed by tubes and monitors, a nurse adjusting an IV line with hands far too calm for how hard Seraphina's heart was slamming.

"What happened? Tell me everything."

The attending doctor met her outside the room, chart pressed to his chest, face carefully neutral in the way doctors trained themselves to be when the news wasn't good. "His heart function dropped faster than projected, Miss Lark. We were watching the surgery date for next week, but at this rate he may not make it that long. We need to move the operation up. Possibly within days."

"Days." Seraphina's whole body went numb, blood rushing loud in her ears. "The surgery costs — I don't have the funds transferred yet, the contract said thirty days before payment, I thought I had *time*, I thought we had more time than this—"

"Then we don't wait for thirty days." Alaric's voice came from directly behind her, steady, absolute, already pulling his phone free from his coat pocket. "Doctor, whatever this surgery costs, whatever equipment or specialists it requires — schedule it. Tonight, if you're able. Payment will clear before morning, I give you my word as Alpha."

The doctor blinked, clearly unused to Alphas appearing in hospital hallways offering blank checks at midnight. "Mr. Voss, I don't think you understand the amount we're discussing—"

"I understand exactly what I'm offering you." His eyes never once left Seraphina's face, steady as a held breath. "Schedule it. Now."

Seraphina turned to him fully, throat too tight to speak for a long moment. "Why would you do this for me? The contract doesn't pay out until all thirty days are finished. You don't owe me a single cent yet, Alaric."

"I'm not doing it because of the contract." Something raw moved behind his eyes, something dangerously close to the very thing rule three had explicitly forbidden between them. "I'm doing it because your wolf calms mine, Seraphina, and mine will not survive watching yours break apart in front of me. Not tonight. Not ever, if I can help it."

The words landed between them like something neither could take back. Down the hall, a monitor beeped steady and even, marking seconds that felt too heavy for a hospital corridor at midnight. For one suspended moment, the thirty-day contract, the fake mate bond, every rule they'd built to keep this simple — all of it felt like paper caught in the wind, ready to scatter the second either of them let go.

Then Seraphina's phone buzzed again against her palm. A blocked number this time, no name attached. A single message lit up the screen, and it turned the hospital's fluorescent light suddenly, sickeningly cold around her.

**Ask him what really happened to Elyse. Ask him before you sign anything else.**

Seraphina's fingers tightened around the phone until her knuckles went white. She looked up slowly from the screen to find Alaric watching her, his expression already shifting from concern into something far more guarded — the same careful, guilty silence she'd learned to recognize back in the clinic, three days and an entire lifetime ago.

"Alaric." Her voice came out low, shaking, barely above a whisper. "Who else knows about tonight? Who else knows we're even here?"

He didn't answer immediately, and in the space where his answer should have been, Seraphina felt the last of her certainty about this man — about any of this — slip through her fingers like water she'd never actually managed to hold.

"Alaric." She said his name again, harder this time, forcing him to meet her eyes instead of the hallway behind her. "I asked you a question."

"Only my inner circle knew we were coming here tonight." His jaw was tight, a muscle working beneath the skin. "Which means either someone in that circle is talking, or someone has been watching us far more closely than I realized."

"Or," Seraphina said quietly, "there's something about Elyse you haven't told me yet, and someone out there wants me to find out before you get the chance to bury it a second time."

Alaric flinched at that, just barely, but enough that she caught it. "That's not what this is."

"Then tell me what it is." Her voice shook, but she held his gaze anyway, refusing to look away first. "Because every time her name comes up, you go quiet in exactly the same way, Alaric. And I am done signing contracts with a man who won't tell me what I'm actually walking into."

Behind them, a nurse called Elian's name down the corridor, and the moment cracked open, urgent and unfinished, pulling Seraphina's attention back toward her brother's room before Alaric could answer at all.

"We'll finish this," she said over her shoulder, already walking away from him. "Tonight. I mean it."

Alaric watched her go, phone still gripped in his hand, and said nothing — because he genuinely didn't know which truth would break her faster: the one about Elyse, or the one about herself.