Finally Found it 110

POV: Isla

The training ground was loud with the crack of sparring swords and the sharp bark of corrections, and I stood at the fence watching the younger wolves work.

Their footwork had sharpened over the past week. I kept the observation to myself and let the work speak. My hand rested on the fence rail and the morning moved around me with the ease of a pack that had found its rhythm.

“Quite the view, is it not?” The voice arrived at my left shoulder without a footfall, without warning. My pulse spiked before I turned.

Malrik was already there, leaning against the fence with the deliberate ease of a man who had been practicing how to enter a space unheard for years. His pale face was half-shadowed by his dark hood, his angular features cold and composed.

His gray eyes were fixed on the sparring circle with the analytical patience of someone cataloguing threats. Not the wolves, I understood. The terrain. The exits. The distance between me and everyone else.

“What do you want, Malrik?” I asked, keeping my voice level and my expression clear.

He turned those gray eyes on me, his lips curling into a faint smile that stopped well short of warmth. “A little conversation,” he said, his tone pitched soft and reasonable. “Is that so much to ask?”

My silver eyes narrowed. “You do not do anything without a reason. So what is it this time?”

Malrik chuckled, low and unhurried, and let his gaze drift back to the sparring wolves. When it returned to me, the smile remained, but the quality beneath it had sharpened. “Do you ever wonder, Luna,” he began, his voice dropping, “what Draven is hiding from you?”

Every muscle in my body pulled taut. I kept it off my face. “If he is hiding a matter, it is for a reason,” I replied, my tone flat and clean.

“Ah.” His grin widened, satisfied in a way that made my skin crawl. “Is that what you tell yourself? Or is it easier to believe that than to face the possibility that he simply does not trust you?”

The words landed the way they were designed to — precise and below the ribs. My jaw tightened, and for one unguarded breath a flicker crossed my face that I could not stop in time.

I turned to face him fully. “Why are you really here?” I demanded, my voice sharper now, pushing past the unease his words had stirred.

Malrik’s smile shifted into a performance of sincerity, his posture adjusting as though he had decided to try it on for size. “To help,” he said smoothly. “And perhaps to remind my dear brother that the past does not stay buried forever.”

My chest tightened at the weight those words carried. Before I could respond, Malrik straightened, his dark cloak swinging behind him as he pushed off the fence and began to walk away.

He stopped once, glancing back over his shoulder, his expression entirely unreadable. “Draven does not tell you everything because he does not know how to,” he said. “That is the difference between him and me. I will always be honest with you, Isla.”

He moved into the shadow of the packhouse doorway and was gone, swallowed by the dark of the corridor as completely as if he had planned the exit.

I stared after him. He had not said anything I could call a direct lie. That was the most dangerous part — the precision of what he left out, and what he chose to leave in. When I turned back to the training field, my breath caught entirely.

Draven stood at the edge of the sparring circle with his amber eyes fixed on me, his entire frame radiating the tension of a man holding himself at the edge of action by sheer will. His shoulders were squared, his jaw set, and his gaze burned across the full width of the ground between us.

He moved toward me, his footfalls deliberate and unhurried, the sparring wolves parting without being asked and without being acknowledged.

When he reached me the air between us was already charged. His voice was low and controlled in the way of a current kept below the surface by active force. “What did he say to you?”

The question cracked through the careful patience I had been carrying for weeks, and the frustration inside it surged forward before I could manage it back down.

“Why will you not just tell me the truth?” I shot back, my voice cutting clean through the noise of the training ground. My silver eyes held his, steady and hard. “What are you so afraid of?”

The space between us charged with every unspoken truth pressing outward from both sides, filling the air between us. Draven’s jaw locked. Then — briefly, visibly — the coldness and the control both broke, replaced by regret of the kind that has had time to become permanent.

He exhaled, slow and deliberate, and when he spoke his voice came out rough with the weight of a man who had been carrying a particular truth far too long. “Because the truth could destroy everything.”

The words hit the air between us and held there. I let them. I was not going to be the one who rushed past them.

I held his gaze and did not move. My voice came out quieter than I expected, stripped of heat, carrying only the clarity I had left. “Then you had better decide whether it is me you are protecting or yourself. Because I cannot fight alongside you in the dark, Draven. And I will not keep trying to.”

His amber eyes stayed on mine. The training ground carried on around us — swords and orders and the ordinary, grinding work of a pack preparing for what came next.

For the first time since Malrik had appeared at the fence, I felt the ground under my feet solidify.

I was not afraid of the truth. I never had been. I had survived enough of it, absorbed enough of it, rebuilt myself from the worst versions of it delivered by the cruelest hands.

Truth was never the thing that broke me. It was always the silence around it — the careful, deliberate withholding that left me guessing in the dark.

I was afraid of what it would mean if he kept choosing to carry it alone while standing right next to me.