Finally Found it 114

POV: Isla

I closed the door and Draven’s fury came off the leash.

I watched him cross the length of the Alpha’s quarters three times, claws flexing at his sides with each pass, the room too small for what he was carrying.

“I told you to stay away from him,” he growled. His voice was low and taut, a warning delivered to someone he considered still in range to receive it.

I kept my arms crossed. “And I told you I am not some fragile thing you need to protect from the truth. If there is something about Malrik I should know, tell me.”

I watched Draven stop. His jaw pulled tight, his expression the specific kind of closed that belongs to a man who has decided the direction of a conversation before it begins.

“You do not understand,” he said, his voice rough. “He is not just manipulative. He is a master at turning people against each other. It is how he has survived his entire life.”

“Then tell me why.” My frustration finally broke the surface and I let it, because there was no reason left to keep it contained. “Why does he hate you so much? What happened between you two that you will not talk about? I am your mate, Draven. I deserve to know.”

He exhaled sharply, almost involuntarily, and leaned against the edge of the desk, his fists closing against the wood. The silence stretched long enough that I thought he might refuse. I kept my ground and waited. Then:

“He resents me because I was chosen to lead,” Draven said. His voice had dropped into something rougher, weighted with more cost than the anger had been.

“Our father saw something in me that he did not see in him. Malrik was passed over. Left to scrape by with whatever scraps of power he could find. He blames me for every failure he has ever had.”

The explanation settled into the room. I let it settle and do its work before I answered.

Malrik’s gray eyes at the table, that particular hunger beneath the careful casualness, the way he had aimed every word at me with the precision of a man watching where a stone lands: all of it reorganized itself around what Draven had just told me.

The resentment between them was not abstract. It had a shape and a history and a name.

“And now he is here,” I said, “using that resentment to chip away at everything we have built.” I did not soften my voice for this next part. “You think keeping me in the dark will stop him? It only gives him more power.”

Draven turned to face me. His amber eyes carried the kind of pain that had nothing to do with anger. The older kind. Deeper. “You do not know what he is capable of, Isla. He manipulates, undermines, poisons everything he touches. I will not let him do that to you.”

“Then trust me to see through his lies.” I moved closer and closed the distance between us, stepping into his direct line of sight until contact was unavoidable.

“I am not a child, Draven. If you keep treating me like one, how can I trust you to treat me as your equal?”

The words hit him. I watched them land in his expression the way an irreversible thing lands. His shoulders dropped from the rigid set they had been holding all evening, the fight leaving them on a single long exhale.

“You are right,” he said. His voice had gone quiet, stripped of the protective fury and left with the raw material underneath it. The admission cost him. I could see it in the careful stillness of a man who does not surrender territory easily.

“But there are things about Malrik that even I cannot face. Things I do not want you dragged into.”

I stepped into the space his honesty had opened and put my hand against his chest. His heartbeat was there under my palm, steady and heavy, the heartbeat of a man who carries more than he lets people see.

“We are in this together, Draven,” I said. “Whatever shadows he brings, we will face them side by side.”

He pulled me into his arms without ceremony, his hold tight in the way of a man who cannot always say what he means but can communicate it through the grip of his hands.

I felt the tension in him, the way it had not fully released, the part of this that had not yet been resolved because no single conversation was going to resolve it. That was fine. We had time. We had each other.

“You are my anchor, Isla,” he murmured, his voice low against my hair, carrying the full weight of what that cost him to say.

I held the fullness of what that meant and let it sit in the room with us. He had spent years as the immovable thing, the one everyone else held onto.

He was not accustomed to being the one who needed holding. I understood that, in the specific way you come to understand the things that cost people most to admit. Not through being told. Through watching closely enough to see.

I had fought to walk into Crimson Fang with nothing and build every piece of my position here with my own hands and my own choices. I had not come this far to be kept outside the room when the real decisions were made.

Whatever Malrik had in motion, whatever history lay between the two brothers that Draven had not yet told me, it was coming regardless of how tightly he tried to shield me from it.

The only question was whether we met it divided or together. I had decided my answer to that a long time ago.

I kept my hand on his chest and felt his heartbeat steady beneath my palm. I did not step back. I was not going to.