Finally Found it 101

POV: Draven

The storeroom smelled of broken glass and rogue, the specific, sharp combination of two things that had no business being in the same room inside Crimson Fang’s walls.

Susan moved through the wreckage without touching it, her sharp eyes cataloguing the dark pools seeping from shattered jars, the pattern of someone moving with purpose rather than panic.

Alaric crouched behind a barrel and came up with a scrap of torn fabric. He held it. His face hardened.

“This scent isn’t one of ours.” His voice came out low. “It’s faint, but I’d recognize it anywhere. It matches the rogue we tracked near the eastern border last month.”

Susan’s hands closed into fists. “If a rogue planted poison here, someone inside let them in.” Her tone cut through the dim room with the specific edge of a woman who had already arrived at the conclusion and was now delivering it. “We’ve got a traitor.”

Alaric’s jaw went tight. “And they know how to cover their tracks. This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment plan.”

Upstairs, Isla sat at the hearth’s edge with her hands pressed to her abdomen, and I stood at the window and held the full weight of what had almost happened in the only place I could hold it without it breaking the room.

She had not moved since Micah arrived. Her silver hair fell loose over her shoulders. The trembling in her fingers had not stopped.

Micah worked with her usual precision, her fingers counting Isla’s pulse, her face moving through the calculation that healers ran when they needed to separate what was physical from what was not.

Whatever she found steadied her enough to speak. Her voice came out firm, the specific firmness of a wall built to hold rather than to comfort.

“You’re fine.” She held Isla’s gaze. “But listen to me, Isla. From now on, nothing passes your lips that I haven’t checked myself. No food, no drink. Understood?”

Isla nodded. Her voice broke at the edges when it came. “Someone tried to kill my children.”

Micah’s expression moved through a register she did not usually show, a flash of raw feeling cracking through the professional surface, brief and total. “We won’t let them get close again.”

My shoulders were boards. My fists were locked. I had placed myself at the window because the window gave me the perimeter view and the distance I needed to keep the fury from landing on the room.

Looking out at the dark gave me somewhere to put the images that kept arriving: Isla’s hand on the goblet, the wolf going down, the arithmetic completing in under a second.

Someone had been in that hall tonight who knew whose goblet it was and who was carrying those children. That was not a rogue operating alone. That was precision. That was a line inside my walls.

They had used it in the specific moment when I had been holding Isla on the dance floor and the pack had been watching and everything had looked exactly the way it was supposed to look.

I turned from the window and let the fury come forward into my voice rather than my hands.

“No one will harm you again, Isla.” My voice dropped to the register that vibrated at the floor of the room. “I’ll tear apart anyone who tries.”

The words landed on her. The specific, small change in her shoulders told me they had. She reached for me and I crossed the room in two strides and went to my knees in front of her, my hands covering hers, holding the trembling steady through contact.

“We’ll find them.” My voice was quieter now, but no less certain. “And when we do, they’ll understand what it means to reach for what’s mine.”

The door opened with the specific force of someone who had news and had decided news did not need a knock.

Susan came through it with a torn scrap of fabric and a face set for bad news. She put the fabric on the table. “We tracked the rogue. The trail goes cold near the forest’s edge. Whoever they are, they knew what they were doing. This wasn’t a mistake.”

I stood. My amber gaze moved across the room: Susan, Alaric, the fabric, everything it implied about planning and access and someone inside patient enough to wait for the right moment. “Then we’ll make them regret it. They thought they could slip through our defenses unnoticed. They’re wrong.”

Alaric entered behind Susan, his expression reading nothing, his voice sharp regardless. “If the scent fades that fast, they’ve either masked it intentionally or someone inside is shielding them.”

My claws flexed at my sides. “Start with the visitors. Question everyone.” I looked at Alaric. “No one leaves until we have a name.”

Susan was already moving. “We’ll get answers.” Two words that carried the weight of a guarantee.

The room held its specific post-action silence, the weight of people who had been given direction and were calibrating next steps. She looked up at me, and her silver eyes held the glisten of tears she was not going to release.

“What if we don’t?” she whispered.

I knelt in front of her again. My hand found her face. “We will, Isla.” My voice dropped to the register I reserved for the things I meant without qualification. “Because the alternative isn’t an option.”

She held my gaze without flinching. That was the thing about Isla — she never flinched.

Outside, the territory waited under lockdown, every exit sealed, every visitor being assessed for guilt they had not yet been given the chance to confess.

Inside, in the warmth of the hearth, the only person I had ever built walls around was sitting in front of me with her hands pressed to her abdomen and her chin level despite everything.

The promise was already made. It had been made the night she walked onto my territory bloody and unshifted and entirely unwilling to be less than she was, and every night since had been the keeping of it, and tonight was no different.

I intended to keep it, and the people who had reached into this hall tonight were going to find out exactly what that cost them.