Finally Found it 103

POV: Isla

The dungeon smelled of damp stone and old iron and Seraphine, which was a specific combination I had grown up with and never once found comforting.

I came down alone. I had not told Draven I was going, and I was not going to explain why afterward.

The explanation was simple and unflattering: I needed to look at her myself. Not through a report. Not through Alaric’s account.

Through my own eyes, with my own read, because I had been studying Seraphine’s face since before I could name what I was looking for in it.

She was on her cot when I entered, her crescent mark casting its faint glow against the cell wall, her posture arranged into the particular slouch she adopted when she wanted to look unbothered. She lifted her head with the unhurried timing of a woman who had decided the delay was its own statement.

“Ah, sister,” she drawled, the smile arriving before the words did. “What an unexpected pleasure. Though I must say, it’s customary to bring gifts when visiting the damned. No wine? No delicacies? Tsk, tsk.”

I crossed my arms. “Did you poison me, Seraphine?” No preamble. No warmth. Just the question, delivered flat, into the dim space between us.

Seraphine tilted her head, her expression arranging itself into feigned innocence. “Straight to accusations, are we? I thought family visits were supposed to be cordial.”

“Answer the question.” I moved closer, my boots finding each stone with deliberate weight, closing the distance until she had to either hold my stare or look away. She held it.

Her smirk shifted. It faltered, a fraction, for long enough to mean it was real. Then her hand moved to her stomach — not a dramatic gesture, not performed — and when her tone came back it had lost the mockery. Her crescent mark flickered as she spoke.

“Do you really think I’d risk my own child? I want this baby to be born strong, Isla. Why would I endanger that?”

I studied her. Her hand resting against her stomach, unperformed. Her face, from which the humor had drained and been replaced by an expression that was not warmth but was genuine. I had spent enough of my life reading Seraphine to know the difference between her theater and her truth.

I held her gaze. “Because you’ve risked worse for less. You’ve schemed, lied, and hurt everyone around you for power. A baby would not stop you from trying again.”

The dark laugh that came out of her bounced off the stone walls and came back doubled, filling the cell. She leaned back against the wall behind her cot and let the sound finish before she spoke again.

“Flattery will get you nowhere. Believe what you want, sister. But this time, I’m innocent.” She turned her head slightly, her eyes moving to the ceiling as though the conversation had become mildly tedious. “I’d rather focus on the future than get bogged down in petty conspiracies.”

I kept my voice level and cool. “And yet here you are, chained and powerless because of those petty conspiracies.”

The smile that came back at me was sharper than anything she had shown so far, honed on a belief she held.

“Here I am. But you should keep looking for your culprit, little Luna.” She held my gaze with a precision I recognized from childhood, the look she used when she was giving me real information wrapped in condescension so I would dismiss it. “I’m sure you’ll find someone much closer to home.”

I held her stare for a long moment, then turned and walked back up the stairs. Her laughter followed me out of the cell, up through the dark corridor, reaching all the way to the top step before it faded, and I let it.

Draven was waiting at the end of the hall above, and the look on his face told me he had already made a stop of his own.

He had cornered my parents in a quiet corridor off the main hall, and the scene he described to me afterward was exactly what I would have predicted.

My mother performing grief with practiced precision, her voice going soft and injured, her eyes finding tears on command. My father, more controlled, more calculating, flanking her words with the specific smoothness of a man who had spent years managing how he appeared in rooms.

“We’re as devastated as you, Alpha. Isla means everything to us.” Her father pressed in beside her without pause. “We would never harm our own blood. Surely, you must know that.”

Draven had leaned close enough that there was no mistaking his intent, his amber gaze burning through every word they offered. “If I find out you’re lying, no family ties will save you.”

My mother had wrung her hands, the gesture she had been deploying since I was a child to signal victimhood. “Alpha, please —”

“I’ve heard enough.” He stepped back before the performance could go further. “You’ll remain under scrutiny until I’m certain of your innocence. Pray I don’t find reason to doubt you.”

He walked away. Behind him, they stood in the corridor and watched him go, and Draven being Draven had registered every expression they showed in the seconds they believed no one was watching anymore.

When he told me, his voice was flat and certain. His instincts had given him a verdict: desperate, manipulative, but not guilty. Not this time.

I listened. I processed it. I filed it alongside what I had read in Seraphine’s face in that cell.

Two separate conversations, one answer: whoever poisoned my goblet was still out there, still inside these walls, still waiting, and they were not who I had expected.

That was worse, in the particular way that unknown threats were always worse than the ones you had already named.

Seraphine in chains was a contained problem, one I could walk down to and look at and measure. A faceless enemy still moving freely inside Crimson Fang was a different category of threat entirely.

I was exhausted with being the thing people aimed at from angles I had not chosen to leave open.

I walked back toward the war room, and I did not slow down, and I did not ask for anyone to walk beside me.

I would find them. That was not a resolution born from courage or righteousness. That was a fact, and I had already started working on it the moment Seraphine said closer to home.