Finally Found it 102

POV: Draven

The visiting Alphas had arrived as guests. They were leaving as liabilities.

I read that in the set of shoulders and the angle of chins as I moved through the locked-down packhouse.

Three days since the poison had been found. Three days of patrols, of sealed corridors, of warriors stationed at every external door.

What had begun as celebration had calcified into tension and suspicion, and the wolves who had come to share in it were feeling that change the way all predators feel shifts in their environment: personally.

Elyra of the Silver Moon Pack found me in the courtyard before I found her.

She was stationed near the far gate with her arms folded and her silver eyes pulled narrow, and she moved to intercept me with the particular stride of a woman who has been building a statement for several hours and has decided now is when she delivers it.

“You brought us here to celebrate,” she said, her voice sharp enough to cut, “but instead, we are locked in a fortress, treated like suspects. What kind of Alpha loses control of his own pack?”

The growl came up through my chest before the words did.

Isla stepped forward from my left. I had not heard her approach.

“If you do not feel safe, Elyra, you are free to leave,” she said. Her voice was calm, but the calibration of it was deliberate: the specific calm of a woman who could just as easily make it not calm. “But do not mistake caution for weakness.”

Elyra’s eyes moved to Isla. The irritation in them encountered a resistance it had not been expecting and adjusted.

She held the silence for one beat, two, then turned and walked away, her silver cloak sweeping the stone behind her.

I looked at Isla.

She looked back at me with the expression she wore when she had done the necessary thing and was not interested in being thanked for it.

I said nothing. I did not need to. The war room was worse.

Garren of the Iron Fang Pack had positioned himself at the table with the posture of a man taking up as much space as physically possible, his bulk pressed forward over the surface.

His eyes moved between the report pages and my face with the evaluating contempt of someone deciding whether the reputation was deserved.

“A poisoned Luna,” he said, leaning further across the table. “A fractured pack.” His sneer arrived with the measured timing of a man who has rehearsed it. “Maybe you are not as invincible as you think, Draven.”

My fists came down on the table. The crack of impact cut across every voice in the room and produced the silence I required.

My claws extended. The wood held the marks. I rose to my full height and let Garren absorb what he was looking at before I spoke.

“Say that again, Garren.” My voice dropped to the register I reserved for final warnings. “See what happens.”

Garren held his ground. His shoulders set and his jaw locked and he did not look away, which meant he was either braver or more foolish than his reputation suggested.

Susan’s voice cut across the table before either of us resolved it.

“Enough.” Clean and hard, her Beta’s authority filling the room the way it filled every room when she chose to deploy it at full force. “If any of you have evidence, share it. If not, shut your mouths and let us work.”

The room dispersed. The tension did not.

In our quarters, Isla sat on the edge of the bed with her hand resting lightly against her stomach, that gesture now so habitual her body performed it without consultation.

I stood in the doorway and watched it. The fear I carried for her and the children was not loud. It had settled into the steady, permanent register of things that do not leave: a weight I had chosen to carry because the alternative was not to have her to worry about, which was no alternative at all.

“Do you think this could be my family?” she asked. Her silver eyes found mine in the dim light, and the question behind the question was visible in them: not can they, but would they still.

I moved into the room. “Your parents want to be our allies,” I said. “And Seraphine is under constant surveillance.”

Isla’s mouth pressed into a line I had learned to read accurately. “That has not stopped her before.”

I crossed to her and put my hands on her shoulders, not gently, but with the particular weight that said I am here, I am real, I am between you and whatever is moving in the dark. She did not pull away from the grip.

“Whatever you are thinking,” I said, keeping my voice low and direct, “do not act on it. And do not go to her alone, Isla. Promise me that.”

The reluctance moved across her face in a wave, transparent as it always was when she was agreeing to a constraint she had not chosen. Then she nodded.

I left to oversee the investigation. I trusted her word. That was the mistake.

Susan found me at the perimeter an hour later, her expression carrying the specific neutrality she wore when she was delivering news she would have preferred not to deliver.

“Isla called me,” she said. “She wants to go to the dungeons.”

The cold that moved through me had nothing to do with the night air.

“She asked you to take her,” I said. It was not a question.

Susan held my gaze. “She said you were not here.” A pause, precisely weighted. “And that she needed answers.”

I turned back toward the packhouse without another word, my boots on the stone covering the ground at a pace that would not be outrun.

Isla. Moving toward Seraphine. Alone but for Susan, in the hours when the packhouse was most vulnerable and the corridors were watched by wolves whose loyalties I had not yet fully confirmed.

I had made her promise.

She had made the promise.

And she had broken it the moment the door closed behind me, because that was who she was: a woman who accepted a constraint and then measured, with cold precision, how far that constraint actually extended and what moved in the space just beyond it.

I was not angry. I did not have the luxury of anger. What moved in me as I covered the distance back to the packhouse had no clean name.

I had stood over Tobias while he stopped moving. I had fought through wounds that should have taken me off the field. I had made decisions that cost wolves their lives and accepted that cost because leadership demands that kind of accounting.

None of it had ever moved me the way that single sentence did. She wanted to go to the dungeons. She wanted to go to Seraphine. And she had waited until my back was turned.

Seraphine was in those dungeons. And Isla was on her way to her. The investigation could wait. Everything could wait.