Chapter 22: What Was In The Trees
1281 Words
NORA POV
“Tell me what was in the trees”
Rhett looked up from his desk.
I had closed the study door behind me and I was standing in front of it and I wasn’t moving until he answered me. He could see that. He put his pen down.
“Sit down” he said.
“Just tell me first.”
He looked at me for one second. Then he said, “A scout.”
The word landed flat and cold.
“Someone was in the woods” he said. “Running surveillance on the grounds. Close enough to have been watching the house for hours before the patrol wolves picked up the movement.”
“Hours” I repeated.
“Possibly longer.”
I walked to the chair and sat down. My legs needed me to sit. “Did you catch them?”
“No. They were already running by the time we got to the tree line. Fast. Trained.” He kept his voice even. “But they left equipment behind.”
“What kind of equipment?”
He held my eyes. “Ironridge.”
The room went quiet.
Warren.
Warren, who was sitting two floors below us right now in Rhett’s house, eating Rhett’s food and sleeping in Rhett’s guest rooms. Warren who called my phone twice and sent a delegation with no advance notice and stayed past his welcome because of travel logistics.
Warren had sent someone into Blackwood territory to spy on us. While he was inside the house. While we were all sitting at the same dinner table.
“He actually did it” I said. “He sent a scout into your territory.”
“He did.”
“That’s a violation of pack law.”
“Yes.”
“So what do we do with that?”
Rhett leaned back in his chair. “Nothing yet.”
“Nothing?”
“We act normal” he said. “For the rest of the delegation visit. We give Warren nothing to see. We send him home without what he came for.”
I stared at him. “He just ran surveillance on your house!”
“I know.”
“He had someone in your trees for hours and you want to act normal?”
“I want to act normal until we know exactly what that scout managed to gather” Rhett said. His voice stayed even. “If we react now, we show him he rattled us. We show him the information has value. Right now he does not know how much we know about the scout.”
I pressed my lips together. He wasn’t wrong. I hated that he wasn’t wrong.
“What did he come for?” I said. “The real reason. Not border talks. Not territory issues. What does Warren actually want from this visit?”
Rhett looked at me steadily. “Confirmation.”
“Of what?”
“He has a theory” Rhett said. “About this pack. About the Luna. About the switch. He has been building it for two years and now he thinks he has enough of the shape of it that one solid piece of proof will make it complete.” He paused. “He sent the scout to gather that proof.”
My stomach dropped slowly.
“The house has windows” I said.
Rhett didn’t answer.
“Rhett.” My voice came out tight. “The east wing guest room has a window. My room has a window. If that scout had a long lens and enough time…”
“I know.”
“Dana being here is not a theory Warren is guessing at anymore.” I was sitting forward now. Both hands on the desk. “If they got a clear shot through that window at any point in the last two days, he has it. He has her. He has both of us in the same building with the same face and that’s not a theory, that’s proof.”
Rhett was quiet.
That specific quiet. The kind that meant he had already worked through this and the answer was not good and he was choosing how to hand it to me.
“We don’t know what they got” he said finally. “That’s the problem. We know they were there. We know they had equipment. We do not know what images, if any, came out clean enough to be useful.”
“But it’s possible.”
“Yes.”
“It’s possible Warren already has exactly what he needs.”
“Yes.”
I sat back. My chest was going hard. That deep pulse, steady and heavy, like my body was responding to something my brain was still catching up to.
The gathering was at the end of the week. That was what Judith’s note had said. The gathering at the end of the week.
If Warren had clear photographs of both Dana and me in this house, he didn’t need to wait until the gathering. He could use them anytime. He could use them tonight at dinner if he wanted to.
“He’s going to wait” I said slowly. “Isn’t he. Even if he has the photos. He’ll wait for the gathering because the audience is bigger.”
Rhett looked at me.
“He wants the whole pack watching when he does it” I said. “That’s the point. It’s not just about exposing us. It’s about doing it publicly so the pack fractures in real time and he can step into the gap.”
“Yes” Rhett said. “That is what I believe.”
“So we have until the gathering.”
“Four days.”
Four days. Four days to do what we had talked about yesterday, bring it out on our terms, control the story before Warren could h****k it. Except now Warren might already have photographs and the timeline had just gotten a lot less comfortable.
“We need to move faster” I said.
“Yes.”
“The thing we talked about. Coming into the open. It has to happen before the gathering. Before he gets the chance to use whatever his scout brought back.”
“Agreed.”
“How do we do it?”
Rhett looked at me for a moment. Really looked. The way he had been looking at me more lately, like he was checking something, like he was making sure I was still standing.
“Together” he said.
He said it the same way he said it last night and it hit the same place it hit then and I looked away for just a second because I was not ready to deal with what that did to my chest on top of everything else.
“Okay” I said.
I stood up. Moved toward the door.
“Nora.”
I turned.
“The scout being there tonight.” His voice was careful. “They were on the grounds while you were in the east garden. While you were with your mother.”
I looked at him.
“They may have seen that too” he said.
The east garden. Me and Judith on the stone wall. My mother who was not supposed to be here. Who had been on these grounds for two days without announcing herself. Who had slid a note under Dana’s door in the dark.
If that scout had a long lens and a clear angle.
Warren didn’t just possibly have Dana.
He possibly had Judith too.
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