Chapter 5: The Woman Claiming to Be My Wife

ALEX POV:

She wore my ring like she'd earned the right to it, and I couldn't remember giving her a single reason to.

I sat up against the headboard long after Dr. Reed left, staring down at my own hand resting useless in my lap, trying to make sense of a body that felt like mine and didn't, all at once. The IV line taped to my wrist. The dull, deep ache along my ribs where something had torn through muscle and bone. None of it matched anything in my head. I remembered the border patrol call. I remembered grabbing my jacket, kissing Serena goodbye, telling her I'd be quick.

I didn't remember anything after that. Not the ambush. Not three weeks unconscious. Not a wife.

The woman, Clara, she'd called herself, had left an hour ago, and the room still held some trace of her, something soft and floral underneath the antiseptic smell of the medicine cabinet. I hated that I'd noticed it. I hated more that some buried, traitorous part of me had leaned toward it without my permission.

I held up my left hand and studied the ring there like it might explain itself if I looked hard enough.

Gold band, simple, worn smooth in places like I'd turned it on my finger a thousand times without thinking. I didn't remember buying it. I didn't remember a wedding. I didn't remember choosing this for myself, and yet here it sat, fused to my hand like it belonged there more than I did.

My fingers found the mark on my neck next, the raised ridge of skin just beneath my jaw that ached faintly when I pressed it. A mating mark. I knew what that meant. Every wolf knew what that meant. You didn't put a mark like that on someone you weren't bonded to forever, body and soul, no walking it back, no undoing it.

So why couldn't I remember choosing her?

The door opened before I could spiral any further into that thought, and Serena swept in like sunlight breaking through a storm, exactly the way she always had, exactly the way I remembered her.

"Alex." Her voice cracked on my name, and she crossed the room fast, gathering my face between her hands like she'd been terrified she'd never get to do it again. "Oh, thank the moon. They told me you were awake, I came as fast as I could."

"Serena." Relief crashed through me so hard my throat tightened. Finally. Someone who fit. Someone whose face matched the memories still intact in my head, the ones that made sense. "What happened to me? Nobody's telling me anything that adds up."

"You were attacked." Her thumb brushed along my cheekbone, gentle, careful, like she thought I might shatter if she pressed too hard. "A rogue ambush at the border. You've been unconscious for weeks, Alex. We were all so afraid we'd lost you."

"And the woman." I forced the question out even though some instinct warned me I wouldn't like the answer. "Clara. She says she's my wife."

Something flickered behind Serena's eyes, gone almost before I caught it. "She says a lot of things."

"That's not an answer."

"Alex." She sat carefully on the edge of the bed, taking my hand in both of hers, and I let her, because her touch felt familiar in a way nothing else in this entire impossible day had. "I don't want to upset you while you're still recovering. But you've been through something traumatic, and people... people take advantage of situations like this."

"You think she's lying."

"I think it's strange." Serena's voice dropped, careful, almost reluctant, like she hated even having to say it out loud. "You and I were engaged before you ever left for that border patrol. I went away for a while, yes, that part's true, and I should have come back sooner, that's on me. But I never stopped loving you, Alex. And now I come home to find some Omega girl wearing your ring and calling herself your wife, and you don't even remember marrying her?" She shook her head slowly. "I'm not saying anything for certain. I just think you deserve to ask questions instead of accepting whatever you're told."

I studied the mating mark on my own neck again, the ring that wouldn't come off, the strange ache low in my chest whenever Clara's name came up, like my body recognized something my mind refused to.

"If we were married," I said slowly, working through it out loud, "wouldn't I feel something? Anything? Instead of just... a stranger standing in my room?"

"Maybe." Serena's grip on my hand tightened, just slightly. "Or maybe whatever happened to you at that border did more than just take your memories. Maybe it's affecting how you feel things now too. I don't know, Alex. None of us do. All I know is that I love you, and I never lied about who I was to you."

The implication sat there between us, unspoken but unmistakable. She might have.

I wanted to push back against it. Some small, stubborn corner of my mind kept circling back to the ring, the mark, the strange tightness in my chest every time I thought about the woman who'd looked at me that morning like I'd torn her heart out with my bare hands. It didn't feel like nothing. It didn't feel like a lie, either, not entirely.

But Serena's face was the only thing in this entire shattered day that made sense, the only piece of my life that hadn't been rearranged into something unrecognizable while I slept, and exhaustion, fear, and two years of missing memory made it so much easier to lean into the explanation that didn't require me to question everything I thought I knew about myself.

"I don't know what to believe," I admitted, hating how small my voice sounded.

"You don't have to figure it all out today." Serena leaned forward and pressed her lips to my forehead, soft, reassuring, exactly the way I remembered her doing a hundred times before everything went dark. "Just rest. Let your body heal. We'll sort out the rest together, I promise."

I closed my eyes, and for a moment, just a moment, the simplicity of that promise felt like solid ground after hours of free-falling through a life I didn't recognize.

But even with my eyes shut, even with Serena's hand wrapped around mine exactly the way it used to be, I couldn't stop the image that kept surfacing uninvited behind my eyelids. Clara's face in the doorway hours ago. Not angry. Not even pleading. Just devastated, in a way that looked far too specific, far too lived-in, to be something performed for a stranger's benefit.

I didn't understand it. I didn't want to understand it.

But some buried, wordless part of me, the part that had let a stranger mark my neck and slide a ring onto my finger, refused to let her go quite as easily as the rest of me wanted to.