Finally Found it 89

POV: Isla

I felt it before I saw it. Seraphine stopped shifting, and the shadow magic bled out of her in thin threads, unraveling into the night air until there was nothing left of it.

The body beneath mine became human, trembling, fragile in a way I had never once witnessed from her.

I saw her damp hair plastered to her face. The crescent mark on her cheek had gone pale, nearly scarred, the way a wound looks when it has been worked past its limit.

I held her pinned. My own shift reversed without ceremony, my white wolf yielding back to human form, silver hair falling around my shoulders. I kept my weight where it was. I kept my eyes on her.

“Please.” Seraphine’s voice came out raw, cracked at every edge. Her eyes were wet, which did not move me enough to step back. “Please do not kill me. I am pregnant — with Tobias’s child.”

I heard the words and held very still, waiting for the part where I found the lie.

My body went rigid. I did not move off her. I did not breathe. The night pressed in from every direction and Seraphine’s face swam in my vision.

“You are lying,” I said. My voice shook on it, which I registered and hated in equal measure.

“I am not.” She clutched her abdomen with both hands, her breath hitching in her chest. “If you kill me, you are killing your own niece or nephew.”

I moved off her. Not because she had won anything. Because I needed to stand, to recalibrate, to look at her from above rather than have her beneath my hands while that sentence was still ringing in my skull.

I stood and looked down at her, my hands trembling at my sides.

“Start talking,” I said. My voice found its edge again, found the place where it does not shake. I knelt down to her level and let her see that my eyes had not softened, not even slightly. “If you are lying about being pregnant —”

“I am not lying.” She cut across me, her voice hoarse but firm now that she had a shield to hold. Her hand pressed flat to her stomach. “You think I would use this as a bargaining chip? Even I have my limits.”

My laugh came out sharp and bitter before I could stop it. “Do not dare pretend you have limits, Seraphine. How did this happen? When did you —”

I stopped myself and shook my head. “You were never bonded to Tobias. He barely treated you as an equal, let alone a mate.”

The corner of her mouth pulled into an expression older and uglier than any smile she had ever aimed at me.

“Oh, sister. You think you know everything about me, do you not? The perfect Luna with her perfect mate.” She exhaled, and the sound carried every year she had spent grinding against the world.

“You do not know what it is to claw for survival. To use whatever you can to secure your future.”

The words stung. I absorbed them without letting a single trace reach my face. “Tell me the truth, Seraphine,” I said. “Or I let Draven finish what I stopped.”

The smirk collapsed. She sat up slowly, her muscles working against her, and for the first time I saw what exhaustion looked like on her face.

“Fine,” she said, and her voice dropped into a register that held no performance in it.

“You want the truth? Tobias wanted me as his Luna not because of love. Because of what I could do for him. My magic. My schemes. My bloodline.”

“That does not explain how you ended up pregnant,” I said, keeping my voice tight.

Seraphine exhaled, a long unsteady breath, her eyes going somewhere past me. The bitterness in her face was real.

The regret beneath it was also real, and I was not sure what to do with the fact that I could tell the difference.

“Have your spies told you about the night Tobias and I performed the Luna ceremony? When he bit me to complete the bond?”

My stomach turned before she had finished the sentence. “That was not real. You and I both know it was a mockery of the bond.”

“It did not matter to him,” she said, and the sharpness in it was not aimed at me. “To him, it was binding. After the ceremony, he claimed me. Not out of love, Isla. Out of dominance. He wanted to remind me of my place.”

My breath caught before I had the chance to stop it. I did not finish the sentence out loud.

“Yes.” Her laugh came back quieter this time, drained of everything except the fact of it.

“That was the night it happened. And before you ask — no. I did not want it. But Tobias was not the type to ask for permission, was he? He was the kind of man who took whatever he wanted and buried the consequences.”

I recoiled. My fists tightened at my sides and I let them, because it was either that or I would do real damage. “Seraphine. Why did you not —”

“Fight back?” She cut me off, and her voice had a blade in it. “Do you know what he would have done to me? My death would have been the least of it.”

“And besides.” She looked at me directly, for the first time without strategy behind it. “I thought I could use it. A child would tie him to me. Make me indispensable.”

“That is monstrous,” I said. My voice broke on the last word and I did not try to catch it.

Seraphine’s face hardened. The crescent mark on her cheek gave a faint, dying flicker.

“Do not judge me, Isla. I did what I had to do to survive. You have never had to make choices like mine because you have everything — power, love, loyalty. I had nothing, and I made do.”

I stared at her. All of it was true and none of it was sufficient. Pity and revulsion fought each other in my chest with no clean winner, and I let them fight because there was no clean resolution available.

“And now you are using that child to save yourself,” I said. I did not dress it up. “Again.”

I watched Seraphine’s face shift. The hardness in it gave way, the way stone gives way under long enough pressure.

Her voice dropped to barely above a whisper. “I am not lying about this. You do not have to believe me, but that child is innocent. Whatever you think of me, Isla, do not make it suffer for my sins.”

I looked at her for a long time. At the crescent mark we shared, hers faded, mine still burning. At the face that had looked back at me from mirrors my entire childhood, the face I had spent years learning to distinguish from my own.

I was not like her. I had always known it, had proved it across every choice I had made since the night I left everything behind to survive on my own terms.

That was precisely why I stepped back and let her breathe. I was not like her. That had always mattered more than she would ever understand.