Chapter 15: The Fracture
1287 Words
NORA POV
“They know something is wrong”
Bex said it fast, like she’d been holding it in for hours. She grabbed my arm just outside the main hall and pulled me into the side corridor before I could even open my mouth.
“Who?” I said.
“The older wolves. Kade. Mira. Some of the others.” She kept her voice low. “They’re not saying it out loud yet but the whispers are going. I heard them this morning at training.”
“What are they saying?”
Bex looked at me. That look she always got when she was trying to soften something. “Things about you. About little stuff they noticed over the years.” She pressed her lips together. “The way you hold your hands. How you never talk about before you came here. And now there’s a woman in the east wing with your exact face and Marcus just vanished overnight and…”
“Okay” I said. “Okay, I hear you.”
“Nora.”
“I said I hear you, Bex.”
She stared at me for a second. Her jaw was tight. She looked like she wanted to ask the real question, the one sitting right behind her eyes, but she didn’t.
She just nodded and let me go.
The morning had already been rough before Bex pulled me aside.
Training had this weird tension to it. Not loud. The opposite. Too quiet. Conversations that cut off when I walked past. Eyes that found me and then moved away too fast. Wolves who were usually easy around me suddenly finding somewhere else to look.
Packs felt things. I had learned that in my first year here. You didn’t have to tell them something was wrong. They just felt it in the air the way you felt rain coming before the clouds showed up.
Marcus being gone was in the air.
Rhett had told the senior pack members at breakfast that Marcus was dealing with a family situation. He said it the same way he said everything, calm and clean, no room for argument in his voice. Nobody pushed back to his face.
But I saw the looks they gave each other when he turned away.
They didn’t believe it. They were just too smart to say so.
Warren’s delegation was still here.
They were supposed to leave that morning. Travel logistics, Petra had said sweetly over coffee, smiling at me like we were friends. Like she hadn’t sent me a photo of my own face in the dark last night.
Everyone in this house knew travel logistics was not the reason.
Warren wanted to see what happened next. He was staying for the show.
I got through the morning meetings by keeping my voice steady and my answers short. One foot in front of the other. Don’t let anything show. Five years of practice made it muscle memory by now.
But by late morning I needed to move. Needed to do something with my hands that wasn’t sitting in a meeting room pretending everything was fine.
I went to check on Dana.
Her room was empty.
Not just empty. Neat. Bed made, bathroom quiet, no bag sitting open on the floor like she usually left it.
I checked the east wing corridor. Nothing.
I went through the side door and checked the garden. Not there.
I was already pulling out my phone to message her when something made me stop. A feeling. A pull toward the far end of the ground floor, near August’s corner of the house.
The small library.
The door was half open. I pushed it the rest of the way.
Dana was sitting at the small round table near the window. August was across from her. Old books stacked between them, pages open, August’s weathered hands resting flat on one of them.
They both looked up when I walked in.
Dana looked at the table.
That was enough.
“What is this?” I said.
August didn’t look guilty. He never looked guilty. He just looked at me with that face that always seemed to be seeing something slightly beyond whatever was in front of him. “Come in” he said. “Sit down.”
“I’m standing” I said. “What is going on?”
“We were talking” Dana said. Quiet. Still not looking at me properly.
“About what?”
Silence.
“About what, Dana?”
August answered for her. “The prophecy” he said. “The full version.”
I went completely still.
The full version.
He had sat with me in the garden and told me pieces. He had told me about the memory wolf and the suppression and what waking up might feel like. He had said the records were old and the language was difficult and he had given me enough to understand the shape of it.
And then this morning, while I was in meetings and Bex was pulling me into corridors and Marcus was somewhere on a road with no explanation, August had sat down with my sister and told her the whole thing.
My sister. Who had already known about the prophecy before I did. Who had known for five years and said nothing.
“You told her the full version” I said slowly.
“Yes” August said.
“But not me.”
He looked at me steadily. “You came to me. I told you what you needed at the time.”
“And what does she need that I don’t?” My voice came out sharper than I planned. “What is in the full version that you decided she should have before I did?”
August was quiet. Patient. Like the sharpness in my voice was just weather he was waiting out.
Dana finally looked up. Her eyes were red at the edges. She had been crying, or close to it.
“Nora…” she started.
“Don’t” I said.
“Please just let me…”
“You already knew, Dana.” I looked straight at her. “You already knew more than me and you sat on it for five years and now he is sitting here giving you more and I still have the partial picture?” My throat felt tight. “After everything. After last night. After everything you told me, this is happening?”
The library was quiet. Just the three of us and the old books and the grey morning light coming through the window.
Dana pressed her hand flat on the table. “I didn’t ask him to tell me.”
“But you listened.”
“Yes.” Her voice cracked just slightly. “I listened.”
I looked at August. “Tell me.”
“Sit down, Nora.”
“Tell me right now.”
He looked at me for a long moment. His eyes moved to my hand and I realised I had pressed it against my sternum without knowing it, that familiar pressure pushing back against my palm.
He looked at Dana.
Dana looked at me.
And neither of them said a word.
That was worse than anything they could have actually said. The look that passed between them. Like they were both holding the same thing now and figuring out how to hand it to me without it breaking something.
After everything.
After five years of being the one who held it all together while everyone around me knew more than I did.
Still.
Still the last one in the room to know.
- Writer
