Chapter 14: Someone Has a Camera
1435 Words
NORA POV
No message.
Just the photo.
I stared at it for so long my eyes started to burn. Me and Rhett on that wall. Both our faces clear. The tree line dark behind us.
Whoever took it didn’t accidentally take it. They set it up. They got close enough to get our faces sharp and then they sent it to my number, the same number Warren had called twice, and they sent it with nothing attached. No words. No demands.
Just so I would know.
I sat on the edge of my bed until two in the morning. Then three. I kept flipping between the photo and the unknown number like something new was going to appear if I looked long enough.
Nothing new appeared.
I didn’t go wake Rhett. I thought about it four separate times and talked myself out of it each time. The photo wasn’t going anywhere. And I needed to think before I walked into his space with something like this because once I showed him, whatever he decided to do about it was going to happen fast.
Warren was the first name my brain landed on. Obvious. Clean. He had already called my number twice and he was sitting inside this house right now like a man waiting for something to tip in his direction.
But.
Calling from outside and sending a photo from inside the grounds were two different things. Even Warren had to know how far over a line that was. You didn’t send that kind of leverage from inside someone’s territory unless you wanted a direct confrontation.
Petra had been outside the territory rules before she ever walked through the front door.
I put my phone face down on the nightstand.
Petra.
I found Rhett in the hallway outside his office at seven in the morning. He was already up, already dressed, coffee in hand, talking to Conrad in a low voice. Conrad peeled off when he saw my face and Rhett turned to look at me.
“Morning” he said.
I held out my phone.
He took it. Looked at the screen. His eyes moved over the photo slowly, taking in everything, the angle, the distance, the sharpness of both our faces.
“When” he said.
“Last night. After I went inside.”
“Did you respond?”
“No.”
He handed my phone back. His face was doing nothing. Completely flat. He took one slow sip of his coffee and looked past my shoulder at the wall.
“Good” he said. “Don’t respond.”
He started moving toward his office. I followed him in.
“What are you going to do?” I said.
“Handle it.”
“How?”
“I’ll let you know when it’s done.”
I closed the office door behind me. “Rhett.”
He stopped. Turned around.
“That is my face in that photo” I said. “Mine. Not a pack thing. Mine.”
A beat. Just one.
Something shifted in his expression. Small. But it was there.
“Sit down” he said.
I sat. He sat across from me and put his coffee down and for the next hour we went through it properly. Warren and what he had been asking about. Petra and what Dana had told me about their connection. How much damage the photo could actually do and who the most likely sender was.
“If it’s Petra” I said, “she didn’t take it herself. She was inside at that hour.”
“She had someone positioned out there” Rhett said. “Someone who followed the delegation in or was already in place before they arrived.”
“Can Conrad find out who?”
“He is already looking at the gate logs.”
“And if it is Warren who sent it? If Petra passed the photo to him and he sent it?”
“Then he is telling us he has something and he wants us nervous before whatever move he is planning to make.” Rhett looked at me steadily. “Which means we stop being reactive and start being ahead of it.”
“Dana told me things” I said. “About Warren. About what he showed her before the wedding. The documentation he had, the pack records. He has been building this for longer than two years, Rhett. This started before I ever walked through the front door of this house.”
He was quiet for a second. “Tell me everything she told you.”
So I did. All of it. Warren at the coffee shop. The documents. The prophecy and what he explained to Dana about the memory wolf and what the pack would feel if the wrong twin was Luna. I laid it all out and Rhett listened without interrupting and I watched him put the pieces together in real time, watched his jaw tighten once when I got to the part where Dana had known before she ran.
“He gave her a reason to run” he said.
“Yes.”
“And then he waited to see what would happen when she did.”
“He wanted to see if the pack would feel the difference” I said. “If they would start to notice something was wrong with their Luna. And when they didn’t…”
“He started building a different case” Rhett finished.
I nodded.
We sat with that for a moment.
“So what do we do?” I said.
“We get ahead of the photo before he can use it.” He picked up his coffee again. “Warren is still a guest in this house. That means there are rules he is technically still bound by. If he makes a move before he leaves Blackwood grounds, he breaks pack law and that changes everything.”
“So we let him stay?”
“We let him think we are not ready for him.” He looked at me. “And while he thinks that, we get ready.”
It wasn’t perfect. There were too many unknowns and too many moving pieces and the photo was still sitting on my phone like a bomb with no timer. But it was something. It was a direction.
I felt slightly less like the walls were closing in.
Slightly.
The door knocked twice. Conrad.
“Come in” Rhett said.
Conrad opened the door and walked in and something was wrong with his face immediately. I had never seen Conrad look uncertain. He was always the same. Measured. Controlled. Right now he looked like a man who had checked something twice and did not like the result either time.
“What is it?” Rhett said.
“Marcus” Conrad said. “His room is empty. Car is gone from the lot.” He paused. “He left sometime in the night. No one saw him go.”
The office went completely silent.
I looked at Rhett.
He had gone very still. Not the normal kind of still he usually carried around. This was different. This was the kind of still that happened when something got through.
He set his coffee cup down on the desk. Slow. Careful. Like he was doing it to give his hands something to do.
Conrad stood in the doorway waiting.
Rhett said nothing for a long moment. His eyes were on the desk but he wasn’t seeing the desk. He was somewhere else. Working through something behind that face that was giving nothing away.
“Did he take anything?” Rhett asked.
“Just his personal bag from what I can tell. Nothing from the office. Nothing from any pack records.”
“Did he make any calls last night?”
“I am checking.”
Rhett nodded once. “Keep checking.”
Conrad left.
I sat across from Rhett and the question that was now sitting in the room between us was the same one I knew he was already asking himself.
Marcus ran.
The Beta who had known Dana was alive for five years. The man who had looked Rhett in the face just last night and admitted five years of secret contact. He had gone upstairs when Rhett told him to and then sometime between then and now he had packed a bag and driven away without a single word.
Was he scared?
Or did he run to warn someone?
- Writer
