Finally Found it 104

POV: Isla

The packhouse gardens held the kind of quiet that should have been restful. Moon-pale light spread across the wildflowers, the night air carrying their scent, and I moved through it slowly with my fingers brushing petals. The confrontation inside had settled. My mind had not.

My parents were here, and the fact of it kept turning over in my chest, sharp at every edge.

I had not let myself believe they would actually come. I had stored the possibility in the part of my mind where I keep the things I am not ready to look at directly.

Now they had arrived and I was in a garden at midnight instead of sleeping, which told me more about myself than I wanted to know.

“Darling.” The word stopped me cold. The familiar pull of it traveled through me and I felt it and did not move toward her.

My mother stepped out from the shadow beneath the far hedge. Her silk gown moved around her with an ease I had once considered elegant and now recognized as studied. Her hands were clasped in front of her, her face arranged in the soft concern she deploys when she wants extraction.

My father materialized from the same shadow behind her, still carrying the frame of the authority he had used against me for years, his expression wearing warmth he had never once genuinely possessed.

I did not move toward them. I kept my ground and let them cross the distance, and I watched every step of it.

My mother closed the distance and took my hands in hers, her grip firm beneath the performance of gentleness.

“We wanted to speak with you privately,” she said. Her voice carried the same practiced lilt from my childhood. “This is why family is so important. In times of chaos, you need people you can trust — people who love you unconditionally.”

I stared at her. My heart hammered against my ribs, which I resented, because I did not want my body giving them information they had not earned. I kept my face level.

“Love?” I repeated the word with the full weight of everything I had earned the right to put inside it.

My father stepped forward into the space between us, authority draped across his shoulders the way it always had been.

“Forgiveness is the mark of a true leader, Isla,” he said, smooth and calculated, every syllable placed with deliberate care. “A Luna must rise above grudges, above the petty grievances of the past. Show us the leader you have become.”

The words hung in the air and I stood in them. I had rehearsed versions of this moment across every difficult year since I left.

What arrived in me was clarity, cold and absolute. They had not come because they regretted any of it. They had come because I had power now, and they wanted proximity to it, and the language of family and forgiveness was the most efficient route they had calculated.

I yanked my hands free. Sharp and deliberate, the way I do the things that need to be done precisely because they scare me.

“You do not get to demand forgiveness,” I said. My voice rang out clean into the quiet garden. “You have to earn it. And you have not.”

My mother’s mask cracked. The sweetness did not disappear entirely; she had worn that particular face too long for that. But the indignation showed through the seam, clear for one unguarded second.

She was not accustomed to hearing this from me. My father’s jaw tightened, and my mother tried again. “Darling, we —”

I raised my hand and she stopped mid-syllable. “You do not get to rewrite the past,” I said. I looked at her directly and did not soften my eyes the way I used to soften everything. “You left me behind when I needed you most. And now you are here, acting as though it never happened.”

My voice shook with restrained fury, each word placed precisely where I intended it. “You want something. That is all this is.”

My father opened his mouth to respond, but the garden shifted before he got a word out.

Draven stepped from the path behind me. The air changed around him immediately, pressure condensing with his presence. His amber eyes locked onto my parents and the assessment was already done. He moved to my side, his hand settling on my back, his voice low and flat and final.

“Isla has made her position clear,” he said. His gaze stayed on them. “Do not push her.”

My father’s poise did not survive that stare. His shoulders drew back in the involuntary adjustment of a man recalibrating. My mother’s mouth opened. Whatever she had assembled dissolved before it could reach air.

They retreated into the shadow without a word, as quietly as they had arrived. I watched them until the garden was only garden again. My chest released on one long exhale.

“Are you alright?” Draven’s voice had dropped into the register he uses when no one else is within range.

I nodded. My hands had not stopped trembling slightly at my sides, and I was not going to pretend otherwise. “I am fine. I just… I needed to say it.”

Later, in the healer’s quarters, I sat with Micah and let the words come out. I ran my hands through my hair and did not attempt to organize any of it.

“They do not care about me,” I said. Bitter and factual. “They only care about what I can give them — my status, my power, my pack.”

I watched Micah lean back in her chair and cross her arms. She has never offered comfort when honesty will do the job better. “Then do not give it,” she said. “You have built this life without them. You do not need their approval.”

I went quiet. The words settled into the part of me that had always known this and had simply needed someone to say it plainly enough that I could stop arguing against it.

Through the window, the courtyard moved with late activity. Warriors ran preparation drills, their movements purposeful and committed. They had chosen a Luna and they showed up for that choice, night after night. I watched them and felt the ground under me become solid.

“I will never let them manipulate me again,” I said. The words came out quiet and I did not dress them up. Quiet is not the same as small.

I heard Micah nod before I looked at her. “Good. Because you do not owe them anything, Isla. Not anymore.”

I already knew this. I had known it since the night I left, since I walked into Crimson Fang with nothing and built everything I now held. Hearing it said plainly, in this room, by someone who had never once required me to diminish myself, the truth of it settled differently than it ever had before.

I turned away from the window and let my hands rest at my sides. The trembling had stopped, which I registered the way I register all the things I have fought for and won.