Finally Found it 91

POV: Isla

The nausea woke me before the sunlight did, arriving with the quiet, unhurried persistence of a thing that knew it was not going to be ignored and was prepared to wait as long as it took.

It had been arriving the same way for four mornings now, not violent, not dramatic, just present, the specific persistent pressure of a body flagging a change it had not yet been given words for.

I pressed a palm flat against my stomach and lay still and ran the inventory the way I ran every inventory: without the panic of a woman who could not handle what the inventory might find.

“Draven.” His name came out soft but it reached him, and he was at my side before I had finished saying it, shirt open from the night before, amber eyes already sharp with the particular concern he wore when he did not yet know what he was concerned about.

“What’s wrong?” His hand found mine with the specific, unhesitating speed of a man who had made a habit of reaching for me.

“I don’t know.” I pressed the palm of my free hand to my forehead. “I’ve felt strange lately. Off.”

His jaw tightened. “We’re going to see Micah.” The tone did not leave room for the argument I had no interest in having.

Micah’s quarters smelled of herbs and low fire and the specific, functional calm of a woman who had been solving problems longer than most people had been producing them.

She worked with her usual brisk efficiency, her hands precise, her expression unreadable in the way that healers’ expressions went unreadable when they were building toward a finding they had not yet decided how to deliver.

I sat on the examination table and held still with the practiced patience of a woman who had learned to wait out examinations without performing calm she did not feel.

Her sharp eyes softened. That was the first tell. Micah’s eyes did not soften for nothing.

“Isla,” she began, and her tone had the specific warmth she reserved for information that was going to require a moment to land. “You’re not unwell. You’re pregnant.” A pause, deliberate and precisely timed. “And — it’s twins.”

The room did not change. The fire crackled. The herbs still scented the air. All of it continued with the complete indifference of the world to the specific, seismic shift happening inside my chest.

My hands moved to my stomach on their own, both of them, pressing flat against the place where two lives were apparently already in residence without having sent any advance notice.

I stared at Micah’s face. She stared back with the patient stillness of a woman who had delivered news of this magnitude before and knew better than to fill the space it required. I let it exist. I used every second of it.

“Twins?” The word came out as a whisper. A tear crossed my cheek and I let it, because some responses were physical rather than chosen and this was one of them.

I had fought in an arena. I had been chained to a wall. I had run barefoot through three miles of dark forest.

I had not cried at any of those things with this same specific, undefended, uncalculated quality.

Behind me, Draven went still, and the quality of his stillness was different from every other stillness I had learned to read on him.

Then I felt rather than saw the shift in him, the specific change in the air when the stillness broke into warmth.

He moved to me, and he knelt, this man who did not kneel for anything, and his hands came over mine on my stomach with a touch so deliberate and careful that I felt it in my throat.

“Twins.” His voice was a reverent whisper, the sound of a man arriving at an emotion he did not have a precedent for and was not going to rush through.

“You’re incredible.” His voice carried the specific weight of awe rather than the performance of it. “You’ve given me everything.”

I laughed, which came out wet and broken and entirely real, the laugh of a woman who had been braced for the next thing and had been given this instead.

I leaned forward and pressed my forehead against his. “We did this together,” I whispered.

His arms came around me and held with the total certainty of a man who had run out of reasons to hold anything back.

Not the protective grip of a man bracing against a threat. The hold of a man who had arrived at what he did not want to let go of and was making that fact physical.

“You’ve made me the happiest man alive, Isla.” His voice was a soft growl against my temple.

I did not argue with that, because it was the kind of statement that did not need arguing with.

I had spent a year learning the difference between depending on someone and choosing them, between needing to be held and holding. This was the second kind.

The woman sitting in Micah’s quarters with her hands on her stomach was not the woman who had run barefoot through the dark three miles from Kael’s holding property.

She had been built out of every one of those miles. She had arrived here on her own feet, and what she was holding, what she was being held by — she had chosen.

Outside, the world continued its business. The war had left its marks on every surface of the packhouse and the pack and the people in it. The rebuilding was still in progress and would be for some time.

But in this room, in this particular morning light, there were two lives that did not yet know what they were coming into, and they were ours, and they were enough.

More than enough. They were every single thing that the war had been fought to protect, every reason the darkness had been worth surviving, every answer to every question I had spent a year trying to prove to myself.