The Alpha's Fake Girlfriend

The Archive

The Elder archive sat in the oldest wing of the pack house, a vault-like room Seraphina hadn't known existed until Alaric led them down a narrow staircase behind a bookshelf that swung open like something out of a story Elian would have loved on any other night. Now the six-year-old slept against a guard's shoulder in the hallway above, finally calm, watched over by two of Alaric's most trusted men while his sister chased down the truth that had unraveled his whole life without his knowledge. The staircase smelled of dust and old parchment, a scent that reminded Seraphina uncomfortably of the healer's wing hours earlier, another buried room holding another buried secret.

"Emergency access requires a blood signature," Alaric said, pressing his palm to a stone panel set into the wall. It glowed faintly gold, then released with a heavy mechanical groan that echoed down the narrow passage. "Only an Alpha's blood opens this door outside of a formal Council session. Cassian can override almost anything in this house. He can't override this."

The room beyond was smaller than Seraphina expected, shelves lined with sealed boxes and ledgers stretching back decades, dust thick enough to prove how rarely anyone came down here at all. A single dim light flickered overhead, casting long shadows across shelves that hadn't been disturbed in what looked like years.

"Twenty-five years ago," Yara murmured, already scanning the shelves with practiced efficiency, her fingers running along cracked leather spines. "If the physical record survived anywhere, it'll be filed by year, not by name. Whoever scrubbed the digital archive wouldn't have thought to touch paper nobody remembered still existed, tucked away in a room most of the pack has probably forgotten exists at all."

They split the shelves between them, and for several long minutes the only sound was the rustle of old paper and Seraphina's own heartbeat, loud in her ears. She pulled ledger after ledger, scanning dates, searching for anything that matched the year Yara had traced from the healer's fragment.

"Here." Yara's voice cut through the silence, tight with restrained excitement. She held up a thin file, its edges brittle with age. "Sealing Order, dated twenty-five years ago this month. Authorized by Council vote, though the vote count itself has been redacted."

Alaric crossed the room in three strides, taking the file from her hands. Seraphina pressed close beside him, reading over his shoulder, her pulse hammering as her eyes scanned the faded type.

*Order to seal wolf manifestation in infant female, surname withheld per requesting party. Reason: protection of bloodline from external threat. Requesting party: —*

The name was gone, a careful black line drawn through it, but beneath the redaction, pressed hard enough into the old paper to leave an impression, Seraphina could just make out the ghost of letters, faint indentations that caught the dim overhead light at just the right angle.

"There's an impression underneath," she said, voice shaking. "Someone pressed too hard writing it the first time. Do you have anything, a pencil, something to shade over it, anything at all—"

Yara was already moving, producing a soft graphite stick from her healer's bag with the speed of someone who'd done exactly this kind of forensic work before, the kind of steady competence that made Seraphina trust her instantly despite everything else unraveling around them. She shaded gently across the indentation, careful strokes revealing texture the eye alone couldn't catch, and slowly, letter by letter, a name rose out of the page like a ghost surfacing from water.

*Voss.*

Seraphina's breath caught. "Voss. That's your family name, Alaric. Not Cassian's mother's maiden name. Voss."

Alaric stared at the page like it had physically struck him, the color draining from his face, the file trembling slightly in his grip. "That's not possible. My father died when I was nineteen. He never mentioned—"

"Maybe it wasn't your father," Yara said carefully, watching his expression with the caution of someone bracing for a wolf about to lose control, her hand hovering near his arm without quite touching it. "The file only says Voss, Alaric. There's more than one Voss who could have requested a sealing twenty-five years ago, and not all of them are men."

The truth landed on Alaric's face before he said it aloud, some terrible certainty crystallizing behind his eyes, the last of his composure cracking in real time. "My mother," he said, hollow, the word barely more than breath. "She was Council-adjacent for years before she stepped back after my father's death. If anyone in my family had the standing to request an infant sealing and have it quietly authorized, it would have been her. She had the connections. The influence. The reason to keep it quiet."

Seraphina felt the floor tilt beneath her for what felt like the hundredth time that night, exhaustion and horror blurring together into something almost numb. "Your mother ordered my wolf sealed. Twenty-five years ago. Before either of us had ever met. Before you were even old enough to be Alpha, before either of us could have had any say in what happened to us at all."

"Which means this was never about you and me," Alaric said slowly, working through it even as the words left him. "This was about something bigger. Something my mother was protecting the pack from, or protecting herself from, long before either of us was old enough to understand what any of it meant."

"Protecting from what?" Seraphina demanded. "What threat is worth sealing a newborn's entire identity away from her?"

Alaric flipped the file over, scanning the back page, and went very still. "There's a second name here. A witness signature, required for any sealing this significant." He held the page up so both of them could see it clearly. "Elyse's family name. Hollow. The Eastern Hollow pack witnessed this sealing twenty-five years ago."

The room went silent except for the soft hum of the old ventilation system. Seraphina's mind raced, trying to fit the pieces into a shape that made sense. "Elyse's family knew. Which means when she married into your pack, she may have married into a secret her own family helped bury before she was even born."

"And if she started investigating carefully what she'd married into," Alaric said, voice hardening with every word, jaw tight with fresh guilt over old grief, "if she found this file, or something very close to it, three weeks before she died—"

Then whoever killed her wasn't only protecting your position as Alpha," Seraphina finished. "They were protecting a twenty-five-year-old secret involving your mother and an entire allied pack. A secret big enough that someone was willing to kill an Alpha's own mate to keep it buried."

Yara had gone very quiet, flipping back through the front page of the file with a healer's careful attention. "There's one more line here. Faded, near the bottom. It references a second sealing authorized under the same order, to be completed upon a future birth within the same bloodline."

"Elian," Alaric said.

"The order didn't just seal you," Yara said, looking up at Seraphina with something like dread, the file's back page still open in her careful hands. "It pre-authorized sealing any child born to you, for as long as the order remained active. Whoever wrote this wasn't protecting against a single threat twenty-five years ago. They were protecting against your entire bloodline continuing to exist unsealed, indefinitely, into the future, generation after generation if it came to that."

A door groaned somewhere above them, footsteps crossing the floor of the pack house with unhurried confidence, and Alaric's head snapped toward the staircase, every muscle in his body going rigid, the file still gripped tight in his free hand.

"That's not one of my guards," he said quietly, voice dropping to something low and dangerous. "I know every footstep in this house. This one's wrong. Too light, too careful, someone who wants to be heard exactly as much as they want to be feared."

Seraphina's hand found the file, clutching it tight against her chest as though it might be torn away the second the door above them opened, twenty-five years of buried truth suddenly the most fragile thing in the room. "Cassian," she whispered, the name tasting like ash.

Alaric was already moving toward the stairs, positioning himself between the archive and whoever was descending toward them, his wolf rising visibly beneath his composure for the first time in hours — not out of feral panic this time, but out of something colder, more deliberate, entirely his own, a control she hadn't seen from him even in the clinic three days ago.

"Stay behind me," he said, voice steady despite everything. "Both of you. We're finally about to find out exactly how much my family has been hiding, and I don't intend to let him walk away with the only proof we have left. Not after everything it's cost us tonight to find it."