Finally Found it 115

POV: Isla

The note had been slipped under my door at some point in the late afternoon, when the packhouse corridors were busy enough that anyone could have left it without being seen.

I read it twice before setting it down, then a third time, because the handwriting was careful and the message was not. “Meet me in the library tonight. There are truths you need to know. — M”

I knew what I should have done. Taken it to Draven, let him read the hand, let him make the call. I knew Malrik’s angles by now — the careful positioning, the information delivered in installments, the patience of a man who had decided I was worth cultivating.

I went anyway. Not because he had outmaneuvered me, but because there are things I needed to know for myself, and I refused to spend my life waiting for other people to decide when I was ready to hear them.

Malrik was already in the library when I arrived, seated at the wide mahogany table with the settled ease of a man who had arranged every detail of the room before I walked in. Ancient tomes and faded scrolls were distributed across the surface with the casual precision of a stage.

A single lantern cast its light across his pale, angular face, sharpening every cold plane of it. His gray eyes found me the moment I came through the door.

“You came,” he said softly, gesturing to the chair across from him. “I was not sure you would.”

“I am curious by nature,” I replied, keeping my voice level as I sat. I kept my gaze on him rather than on the books laid out between us. “What is this about?”

Malrik slid a leather-bound volume across the table toward me. Its cover was embossed with a crescent moon and runes I did not recognize, the leather worn smooth at the edges from handling that predated both of us.

“This is part of your story,” he said, with the tone of a man presenting a prepared argument he expected to win. “A story your so-called parents never told you.”

I frowned. My fingers rested on the cover without opening it. “What are you talking about?”

He leaned forward, elbows on the table, the lamplight catching the sharp precision of his attention. “Your lineage, Isla. It is not what you think.”

“This book, compiled by scholars centuries ago, details the bloodlines of those descended from the Moon Goddess herself. Your silver hair, your connection to her power — none of it aligns with the family you were raised by.”

My breath caught. I opened the book. The pages were dense with symbols, family trees, names in scripts I only partially recognized, and the weight of it pressed against the part of me that had always felt the wrongness of where I came from without being able to name it.

“Are you saying I am not their child?” I asked, and my voice came out quieter than I intended.

Malrik’s lips curved into a faint smile, calibrated to read as sympathetic. “I am saying it is unlikely. You and Seraphine, your powers, your crescent mark, are anomalies in their bloodline.” He tilted his head. “Tell me, Isla, do you look anything like them? Does Seraphine?”

My mind ran the calculation before I could stop it. I had spent years inside a family that looked at me the way one looks at a mistake, and I had absorbed that assessment so completely I had stopped questioning whether the premise was even correct.

The silver hair. The mark on my cheek. The power Lira carried — I had lived with them so long they had stopped feeling like questions.

“This does not prove anything,” I said, my voice steadying as I pressed my palm flat against the open page.

Malrik’s tone softened into a performance of understanding. “No, it does not. But it raises questions, does it not? Questions you deserve answers to.”

I looked up from the book and met his gaze directly. Malrik was the kind of man who read avoidance better than he read honesty, and I was not going to give him the former. “And why do you care? What do you get out of this?”

He chuckled, low and unhurried. “You fascinate me, Isla. Your strength, your connection to the Moon Goddess, it is unlike anything I have ever seen. And I have a fondness for unraveling mysteries.”

The smile turned sharper at its edge. “I would like to help you get to the bottom of this. If you will let me.”

My instincts were unambiguous: no. He was building to an ask and I was the collateral. Everything he had offered tonight was currency toward a cost I had not seen yet.

“Draven would not want me anywhere near this,” I said carefully, watching Malrik’s face for the tell that would come with my resistance.

Malrik leaned back in his chair. “Draven,” he drawled, “is too busy brooding and barking orders to see the larger picture. But you, you are different. You do not follow the path laid out for you. You carve your own.”

My silver eyes narrowed. “You do not know me as well as you think you do, Malrik. And you would do well to remember that.”

“Do I not?” His smirk softened into an impression of sincerity. “We are not so different, Isla. Both of us trapped by expectations, underestimated, and yet — more than anyone knows.”

I closed the book. The sound of it in the quiet library was deliberate and final. My heart sat heavy with the unease of a woman who has just been handed a key and cannot tell yet whether it opens a door or a trap.

“If what you are saying is true,” I said, my voice quiet and deliberate, “it changes everything I thought I knew.”

“Exactly,” Malrik said, his voice smooth and unhurried. “So let me help you uncover the truth. Together.”

I stood. I kept the book in my hands. “I will think about it,” I said, and my voice was even and entirely unreadable, which was exactly how I needed it to be.

As I turned toward the door, his voice followed me, placed with the care of a man who had prepared his exit line well in advance. “You deserve to know who you are, Isla. And I think you will find that I am the only one willing to tell you.”

I walked out without answering him and did not look back, because he would have read that too, and given it a meaning I did not intend.

The corridor was empty, the packhouse settled into the deep quiet of late night. I moved through it with the book pressed against my chest, the unease in my gut twisting alongside the urgency. I had gone into that room knowing it was a risk. I was leaving knowing it was a considerably larger one.

But I was leaving with the book. With the names. With the family trees and the bloodlines and the questions that had lived in me as long as I could remember, finally given the shape of words I could read and verify.

I would bring it to Draven. I would tell him everything Malrik had said, every angle, every careful positioning of it. But I would read every page of it first.