The Alpha's Fake Girlfriend

The Name on The File

Seraphina sat on the edge of her ruined bed, staring at the empty shelf like it might somehow give the envelope back if she looked hard enough. Around her, the apartment told the story of someone thorough, someone who'd known exactly what they were searching for and exactly where to look first. Photographs lay scattered across the floor, frames cracked, the glass from one crunching faintly under Alaric's boot as he moved past.

"They went straight for the closet first," she said quietly. "Didn't touch the kitchen. Didn't touch my laptop, which was sitting right there on the counter, password unlocked. Whoever did this knew precisely what mattered and what didn't."

Alaric crouched beside the empty shelf, running a finger along the disturbed dust. "This wasn't a rushed job. Whoever came through here had time. Which means they either knew you'd be gone for hours, or they made sure of it."

Seraphina's stomach turned, nausea rising sharp and sudden. "The anonymous text. The one about Elyse. You think that was timed deliberately to keep me pinned down at the hospital."

"I think it's possible someone wanted your attention split between two crises tonight, so you wouldn't notice a third happening somewhere else, somewhere quieter." Alaric stood, jaw tight. "It worked."

One of the guards appeared in the doorway, phone in hand, expression grim. "Alpha, we pulled the building's security footage. There's a gap. Eleven minutes, right around the time of the break-in. Someone looped the feed, seamlessly, professionally. Whoever did this knew what they were doing."

"That takes real access," Alaric said, more to himself than anyone else. "Not a random thief. Not even Cassian's usual muscle. This was someone who knew this building's system well enough to loop it clean, without leaving a seam anywhere in the recording."

"So we have nothing." Seraphina felt the walls of her own life narrowing around her, every certainty she'd built as an adult unraveling in real time. "No file, no footage, no proof of anything except that someone wants it badly enough to break in and cover their tracks perfectly."

"Not nothing at all." Alaric pulled out his phone, thumb moving fast across the screen. "The hospital sent through Elian's expanded panel while we were driving here. I told the lab to forward it directly to me the second it came in."

"You didn't mention that."

"I'm mentioning it now." He held the screen toward her, and Seraphina forced her eyes to focus on the data, medical terminology steadying her the way it always did when the rest of her life refused to make sense. Columns of numbers, reference ranges, the same red-inked terminology she'd seen on her own panel hours earlier — except this time the name at the top read Elian Lark, age six.

Her breath caught halfway down the page.

"This can't be right." She took the phone from his hand, scrolling back up, rereading it twice to be certain her eyes weren't deceiving her, certain the exhaustion of the night hadn't started playing tricks on her medically trained mind. "Elian's suppression marker. It's identical to mine. Not similar. Identical, down to the sequence."

"Which means whatever sealed your wolf sealed his too," Alaric said quietly, the weight of it settling over both of them like something physical. "Your brother isn't human either, Seraphina."

The words landed like a physical blow. Seraphina sat back down hard on the ruined mattress, the phone slipping from her fingers onto the sheets. "He's six years old. His whole entire life, every checkup, every diagnosis — nobody ever flagged this. Nobody ever told me anything, not one word, not one warning."

"Because nobody was looking for it. The same way nobody looked for it in you." Alaric knelt in front of her, taking both her hands in his without hesitation, without any pretense of rule one holding him back anymore. "Seraphina, if this marker runs in your family, it didn't happen by accident. Someone sealed both of you deliberately, on purpose, likely at the same time, likely by the same hand."

"My parents." Her voice cracked. "They're gone. I can't ask them anything."

"But someone else might know." Alaric's grip tightened, grounding her the way her hand had grounded him back at the clinic, that same steadying pressure passing between them now in reverse. "Your adoption file would have listed the agency, the lawyer, whoever facilitated the placement. That's exactly why it's gone now, Seraphina. Someone didn't want you finding that thread and pulling on it before you understood what waited at the other end."

A knock sounded at the shattered door frame — Cassian's voice this time, unmistakable, dripping with false concern from the hallway. "I heard there was some trouble here tonight. Thought I'd check on my cousin's new Luna personally."

Alaric was on his feet instantly, positioning himself between Seraphina and the doorway before Cassian even stepped fully into view. "You have a remarkable habit of appearing exactly where trouble happens, Cassian. First the hospital. Now here."

"I have a remarkable habit of caring about pack business, cousin. Nothing more sinister than that." Cassian's eyes swept the ransacked apartment with an expression that gave away nothing, though Seraphina thought she caught the faintest flicker of satisfaction cross his face before he smoothed it back into practiced concern. He stepped over a broken picture frame without looking down, as if the destruction meant nothing to him at all. "Terrible thing, break-ins. Especially targeting someone so recently reunited with pack protection. Almost makes a person wonder if the protection is worth much at all."

"Get out," Alaric said, voice flat and final.

"Of course. I only came to offer help." Cassian's gaze slid past Alaric to Seraphina, and something in his eyes made her skin crawl, a coldness dressed up as sympathy. "Though if I were you, Doctor Lark, I'd start asking harder questions about who benefits from you never learning where you came from. The list is shorter than you'd think. Sometimes the person hiding the truth is the one standing closest to you, holding your hand while they do it."

He left without waiting for a response, footsteps unhurried down the ruined hallway, the sound of them fading long after his shadow had gone, and Seraphina realized her hands were shaking again, this time with something closer to rage than fear.

"He knows something," she said. "Or he did this himself."

"Maybe both." Alaric turned back to her, his expression carved from something harder now, more resolved. "But we're not going to figure it out standing in the wreckage of your apartment at three in the morning. We need to get you and Elian somewhere secure. Somewhere Cassian can't walk through the door uninvited."

"The pack house."

"The pack house has guards Cassian can't buy, wards he can't loop on a security feed, and a healer who already has both your files memorized." Alaric held out his hand, an offer rather than a command, something she noticed he'd started doing more of tonight without either of them mentioning it. "I know I said thirty days, a contract, boundaries. But this isn't about the contract anymore, Seraphina. Someone is actively trying to erase where you came from, and they went after your brother's medical file to do it. I'm not leaving either of you exposed while they finish the job."

Seraphina looked down at his outstretched hand, then up at his face, weighing every rule she'd written on that first night against everything that had happened since. The lines she'd drawn to protect herself felt impossibly thin now, stretched over a night that had already broken every boundary she'd set without either of them fully noticing. She thought of Elian, still unconscious in recovery, unaware his entire existence had just been rewritten by a handful of numbers on a screen. She thought of the empty shelf in her closet, and the eleven missing minutes of footage, and Cassian's voice promising her answers he clearly had no intention of giving freely.

She took his hand.

"Fine," she said. "But when this is over, Alaric, you're going to tell me everything about Elyse. No more careful silences. No more half-answers. I've spent tonight watching you hold back pieces of the truth every time it got close to something that mattered, and I'm done accepting that as an answer."

"When this is over," he agreed, quiet and steady, "I'll tell you all of it. Every piece. I promise you that."

Outside, the guards had already begun boarding up the shattered door, sealing off what little remained of the life she'd built here before tonight tore it open. Neither of them said aloud what they were both quietly thinking — that with Cassian circling closer and an entire past deliberately erased, when this is over felt further away with every hour that passed, and that the pack house, however secure its walls, might only be trading one kind of danger for another.