Chapter 42: Conrad Comes Clean
1300 Words
NORA POV
“I need to speak with you”
Conrad closed the office door behind him.
Not unusual. He closed doors when the conversation required it. What was unusual was the way he sat down. Not the efficient drop into the chair he always did. Slower. More deliberate. Like he was putting something down that was heavy.
I put my pen down. “Okay.”
He folded his hands in his lap. Looked at me directly. No preamble, no building to it. Just straight.
“I have known since the second year” he said.
The office went very quiet.
“Known what” I said. Flat. Even though I already knew the answer.
“That you are not Dana Cole.” He held my eyes. “That you are her twin sister. That what has been happening in this pack for five years is a substitution that began on the night of the wedding.”
I looked at him.
“The second year” I said.
“Yes. Not the first night, like the Alpha. The second year. There was a pack meeting in April. You handled a dispute between two senior wolves and the way you mediated it was different from how Dana Cole had handled disputes in the lead-up to the wedding.” He paused. “I noticed it. I did some quiet investigation over the following two weeks. I confirmed what I suspected.”
“And then?”
“I went to Rhett.” He said it simply. No drama around it. “I told him what I had found. He told me he already knew and that the situation was to continue.”
“He told you to let it go.”
“He told me it was being managed and my job was to support the Luna.” Conrad looked at me steadily. “So I did.”
I sat back in my chair.
Two years in. He had figured it out two years in and gone to Rhett and Rhett had told him to keep going and Conrad, who was the most professionally loyal person I had ever met, had kept going.
“Why are you telling me now?” I said.
“Because the pack is starting to talk” he said. “Because you are running out of time to control this and I believe you deserve to know exactly what you are walking into when the full truth surfaces.” He kept his voice even. “You deserve to know how many people in this house have been working around the truth of you for years.”
“Around the truth of me.” I said it slowly.
“Yes.” He did not flinch from the phrasing.
I looked at the desk between us. The neat surface. The small stack of border notes I had been working through before he knocked.
“Did anyone else know?” I said. “Beyond you and Rhett.”
“Not to my knowledge.” He paused. “I cannot speak for everyone in this house. But from what I know and what I have monitored, no.”
“Just you two.”
“Yes.”
“For years.”
“Yes.”
I sat with that.
Conrad sitting across from me with that controlled face. Running pack coordination, gate security, patrol schedules. Bringing me documents. Calling me Luna in the corridor and at meetings and across a dozen crises without once letting any of it show.
I could not decide what I felt about it.
“Conrad” I said.
“Yes.”
“Do you respect me?” I looked at him directly. “Not the position. Me. The person who has been doing this job.”
He looked slightly surprised. Just slightly. The Conrad version of surprised, which was a small blink and a half second pause.
“Yes” he said. No hesitation after that pause. Just yes, clean and plain.
“Why?” I said.
“Because you learned everything you needed to learn and you learned it fast.” He kept his eyes on mine. “You made good decisions under pressure. You managed difficult people without making them feel managed. You protected the pack’s interests in situations where a less capable person would have exposed every vulnerability we had.” He paused. “You ran this pack well. That is true regardless of your name.”
I looked at him for a long moment.
He was not saying it to make me feel better. Conrad did not do that. He said what he meant and stopped when he was done and that was the whole transaction.
“You could have come to me earlier” I said. “When you confirmed it. You could have come to me directly instead of going to Rhett.”
“Yes” he said. “I could have.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.” He held my gaze. “My loyalty is to this pack and to its Alpha. Rhett told me to let it continue. So I let it continue.” He paused for just a second. “I am telling you now because Rhett did not tell me not to and because the situation has changed enough that I believe you need this information.”
“Rhett knows you’re here?”
“He knows I intended to speak with you today.”
“What did he say?”
“He said it was my call.”
I stared at him.
“That’s it?” I said. “Just your call?”
“Yes.”
I looked at the wall. The morning outside through the window. The quiet ordinary look of the grounds with everything underneath them not ordinary at all.
Rhett knew Conrad was coming to tell me this and he stepped back and let Conrad decide. Not controlling it. Not managing the delivery. Just letting it be Conrad’s call.
The version of Rhett I had built in my head kept not being quite the right shape.
“Conrad” I said.
“Yes.”
“When this comes out to the pack. The full truth.” I looked at him. “Where will you be?”
He looked slightly less surprised this time. Like he had expected this question to come eventually.
“Where I always am” he said. “Running the operations of this pack and doing my job.”
“Even after everything.”
“My job does not change based on the name of the person in the Luna’s chair.” He stood up. Precise. Clean. Like the conversation was done and he had said what he came to say and there was nothing left to add. “It changes if the person in the chair stops doing the work well.” He looked at me. “You have not stopped.”
He moved toward the door.
“Conrad.”
He stopped.
“Thank you” I said. “For telling me directly.”
He nodded once. Then he was gone.
I sat in the office after the door closed.
Two people. Years of knowing. Years of running this pack alongside a truth they were carrying in silence, both of them, for completely different reasons that somehow landed in the same place.
I felt betrayed.
I also felt something else. Something sitting alongside the betrayal that I did not fully have a word for. Not gratitude exactly. Something more complicated. The strange uncomfortable feeling of being protected and deceived by the same exact thing at the same exact time.
I pressed my hand against my sternum.
Tonight.
The window was still open.
Barely.
- Writer
