The Alpha Faked His Death for His Lover. I Disappeared for Myself

I hadn't known Cain had a twin.

Six years together, and he'd never once mentioned a brother. Helena smoothed it over easily enough—Roman left for Europe at eighteen. A fight with their father. Old wounds, old pride. He built a life abroad. Mated a woman named Vivienne. Runs the pack's overseas alliances from somewhere in the Scottish Highlands.

Now he was standing in the entrance hall of Ashford Manor in a black coat, and I could not stop staring.

Because he looked exactly like Cain.

The same jaw, sharp enough to cut. The same dark eyes that caught light like still water. The same way he held his shoulders—slightly forward, weight balanced, always ready to move. Every wolf carries their alpha blood differently, but these two had been poured from the same mold.

"You must be Seraphine."

His voice was softer than Cain's. Or maybe I was imagining that. Maybe grief does something to the ears.

"I'm sorry about my brother," he said. "I should have come sooner."

I couldn't speak. My throat had gone to stone, and the room tilted sideways. Helena caught my elbow before I swayed.

"She's been like this," Helena murmured to him. "She sees Cain everywhere."

Roman stayed.

He was kind to me—impossibly kind. He brought me tea before bed. He drove me to my appointments at the pack healer, sat in the waiting room with his elbows on his knees and his eyes on the door. He asked about the baby with a gentleness that made my chest ache. When I cried—which was constantly, in those early weeks—he never looked away.

"Cain would've wanted someone to look after you," he told me once, standing in the doorway of my room like he was afraid to cross the threshold uninvited. "Let me do that. For him."

And God help me, I wanted to believe it. I needed something in that house to be real.

Then one night, the baby pressed against my ribs and wouldn't let me sleep. I padded down the corridor toward the kitchen, barefoot on cold stone, thinking of nothing but water and maybe some crackers from the pantry—

That's when I heard Helena's voice.

Low. Raw. Furious. Leaking through the gap beneath her study door like smoke.

"You left your pregnant mate standing at the altar—for that woman? You faked your own death so you could run off with her?"

My hand froze on the banister. The air in my lungs turned to glass.

A pause. Then a voice I would know anywhere—in any room, in any darkened wood, in any other lifetime.

Cain's voice.

"Vivienne is dying, Ma. Some human illness—her doctors give her six months, maybe less. It was her only wish. To have me with her at the end."

"And Seraphine? Your child?"

"Six months." Quieter now. Almost gentle with it, like the number made it reasonable. "That's all. Then Vivienne's gone, and I come home. Sera and I still have our whole lives ahead of us. I'll make it right. I swear on the pack, I'll make it right."

I stopped breathing.

The hallway shrank to a single white-hot point. The world I had stitched back together—the fragile, terrible world held up by grief and ginger tea and the faint, warm pull of new life—came apart in my hands.

Cain was alive.

He had never died.

There was no ambush. No silver trap. No charred, unrecognizable body.

There was only my alpha, standing ten feet away, wearing his dead brother's name like a mask—because he had chosen another woman over me and our unborn child.

My hands shook so hard I nearly dropped my phone. But I managed. I opened a message to my brother.

Rowan. I need a crash. Make it real. Make it fatal.

A beat. Then:

He likes playing dead?

I typed back:

I'll show him how it's done.

I locked the screen and pressed it against my sternum, standing alone in the dark corridor of a house that had never been mine, listening to my mate's voice explain, in careful, reasonable sentences, exactly how little I had ever mattered.

The bond in my chest—that half-formed tether, the thing I had mourned for months—pulsed once, like something trying to reach me.

I pushed it down.

And I began to plan.