Chapter 34: Nora Tells Rhett About Roy
1389 Words
NORA POV
“Roy found something in your father’s documents”
Rhett looked up from his desk.
“Sit down” he said.
“I’ll stand. This won’t take long to say.” I moved to the chair anyway, out of habit. Sat. “He found a record of a meeting. Your father and Gerald Steele. Warren’s father. Over thirty years ago.”
Rhett went still.
“The meeting was about the prophecy” I said. “Specifically. Your father took notes. He wrote that Gerald confirmed awareness of it. That the knowledge had been passed down through the Steele family. Third generation.” I held his eyes. “Warren didn’t discover this through research. He grew up with it. Same as you.”
Rhett said nothing for a moment.
“Where are the documents?” he said.
“Roy has them.”
He stood up. “Take me to him.”
Roy was in the main library. He had the box on the table in front of him, the old one, and he looked up when we came in and stood up without being asked.
He and Rhett looked at each other.
Not a warm look. Not hostile either. Just two people who shared a complicated space acknowledging each other in it.
“Show me” Rhett said.
Roy showed him.
The three of us stood at the table while Roy laid out what he had found. The meeting notes. The date. The margin entries in their father’s careful formal hand. Rhett read everything without speaking. He picked up each page like he was handling something that required care and read it fully and set it down and picked up the next.
I watched his face.
Nothing. Or almost nothing. One small tightening around his eyes when he got to the Gerald Steele notation. One pause that was slightly longer than the others.
“I did not know about this meeting” he said.
“I know” Roy said. “It wasn’t in the official records. It was personal papers. The box has been in storage since after the funeral.”
“I went through most of what he left.”
“Not this box.” Roy was quiet for a second. “I found it two years ago. I should have come to you then.”
Rhett looked at his brother. Something passed between them that wasn’t words. Then Rhett looked back at the papers.
“There is a document room” he said to me. “Off the back of this library. I need to check something.”
“What kind of document room?” I said.
“Old records. Pack history from before my father’s time.” He moved toward the library’s far wall. “I want to see if this goes further back than his notes.”
I had been in this library dozens of times. Staff meetings, quiet mornings, finding August here with Dana. I had never noticed a door in the back wall. It was covered by a tall bookshelf that did not look like it moved.
It moved.
Rhett pushed it and it swung out on a hinge and behind it was a narrow doorway and a short corridor and then a small room. Low ceiling. No window. Shelves from floor to ceiling on three walls, all of them packed with boxes and folders and stacked bound records that smelled like old paper and dust and time.
I stepped in behind him and Roy came after me.
“How did I not know this existed?” I said.
“You were never meant to need it” Rhett said. Not unkind. Just straight.
He went to the third shelf on the left like he knew where he was going. Pulled out a large bound record, dark cover, no label. Laid it on the narrow table in the centre of the room.
He opened it.
Old pages. The writing was different from his father’s, older, the letters more formal and pressed harder into the page.
“Your grandfather’s?” I said.
“Yes.”
The three of us stood over the open record and Rhett turned pages slowly. I could read some of it. Pack territory entries. Meeting records. Names I didn’t know. And then references to the prophecy, careful and specific, spread through multiple entries over several years.
Rhett stopped turning.
His finger came to rest at the bottom of a page.
A margin note. Small. Written in tighter script than the main entries, like it was added later, squeezed into whatever space was left.
I leaned in and read it.
The suppression of the memory wolf cannot hold. Whoever attempts it delays only. The delay worsens the break.
I straightened up slowly.
“His grandfather” Roy said quietly. “He knew.”
Rhett had not moved. His eyes were still on the note.
“He knew before our father” I said. “He knew before any of this started. He knew that if someone tried to suppress it, the delay would make the break worse.” I looked at Rhett’s face. “He passed that knowledge down. Your father knew. And you—”
Rhett turned his head and looked at me.
“You knew it was coming” I said. “Not just from reading records after you became Alpha. From growing up in this house. It was knowledge that got handed down the same way it got handed down through Warren’s family.”
He did not deny it.
“Rhett.”
“Yes” he said. Quiet. “I knew it was likely. That whichever twin carried the thread, suppressed or not, would eventually break free of it.” He kept my eyes. “My grandfather believed it was inevitable. My father believed it too.”
“And you married into the Cole family specifically because of that belief.”
“My father arranged it. I continued it.”
“Did you know it would be me?” I said. “When I walked in that first night. Did you know immediately that I was the one who carried it?”
He was quiet for a second.
“Not immediately” he said. “I knew you were not Dana within the first hour. By the second day I had read enough of the signs to suspect which twin you were.” He looked at the open record on the table. “By the end of the first week I was certain.”
The document room was very small. The three of us standing around that table in the low light and the old paper smell and the weight of everything written on those shelves pressing in from every wall.
Roy said nothing. He was watching both of us.
“The note” I said. “Your grandfather’s note. The suppression worsens the break.” I looked at Rhett. “You knew that too.”
“Yes.”
“You knew it was getting worse the longer it was suppressed. You knew my mother had done it when I was a child. You knew every year that passed was making the eventual break bigger.”
“Yes.”
“And you said nothing.”
He looked at me steadily. “What would you have wanted me to say?”
I opened my mouth.
Closed it.
Because that was the real question and I did not have a clean answer for it. What would you have wanted me to say. Not what should he have said. What would I have actually wanted to hear, walking into this house five years ago with no idea what I was, with my wolf locked up tight and my name the wrong one and everything held together by a performance I ran every single day.
What would I have done with that information then.
I didn’t know.
Roy picked up the document carefully. “This changes the timeline” he said. “If the delay worsens the break and the suppression has been in place for twenty-four years—”
“It is already worse” Rhett said. He looked at me. “We already know that.”
Two days. August’s estimate.
Getting shorter.
- Writer
