Finally Found it 116

POV: Isla

The dream came without warning, arriving in the specific, frameless way of a thing that had been sent rather than built in sleep.

A moonlit forest, mist at my ankles, the trees old and gnarled with branches that reached like hands. My silver hair glowed against the dark in the otherworldly way it did when the Moon Goddess was involved, which meant this was not random. This was sent.

Malrik stepped out of the shadows with the unhurried ease of a man who had been standing in them for some time and had chosen his moment.

His gray eyes carried the mist in them, and his voice was soft in the specific, reverential register of a man who had rehearsed the approach most likely to find a hold. “The Moon Goddess chose you for something greater. Don’t let anyone tether you to mediocrity.”

I woke with my heart slamming against my ribs, the dream’s air still in my lungs, the mist still at the edges of the room that was not there.

Draven lay beside me, his arm draped over me with the weight of a man who slept without doubt.

The words from the dream were still in my chest, not because I believed them but because they had been designed to find the specific crack in a woman who had spent years being told she was not enough. Whoever was sending these dreams knew exactly where to press.

I did not wake Draven, because I did not yet have the shape of what I needed to tell him.

Not yet. I lay in the dark and ran the inventory the way I ran every inventory, with the cold clarity of a woman who knew the difference between a threat she could name and a threat she could not yet prove.

Malrik had been in the packhouse for six days. Six days of drifting and cultivating and watching. And now his face was in my sleep.

The dreams returned every night that week, growing darker as though testing the resistance.

The forest became a swirling abyss, and Malrik stood in it looking more solid than the real world, his frail frame carrying a weight that did not belong to his body.

“Your potential is limitless.” His tone pressed at the edges of the words. “But you cling to chains disguised as love. Let them go, Isla. Let me show you what you could become.”

I woke each time with my hands pressed to my stomach. The twins were there, steady and warm, the specific, grounding weight of two lives that were already the reason I was not going to let whatever Malrik was doing find its purchase.

By day, he moved through the packhouse as a man who had already calculated every room.

At a meeting three days into the week, his eyes moved to my belly with the deliberate attention of a man who had decided the children were the lever.

“Your strength.” His voice aimed for casual and landed somewhere else entirely. “It isn’t just yours anymore. Those twins will draw power from you. And power divided is power weakened.”

My eyes found his and I let him see every piece of what I meant. “My children make me stronger, Malrik. Not weaker.”

He smiled, the faint, opaque smile of a man who had not been told what he wanted to hear and was deciding how to rephrase the question. “If that’s what you believe, Luna.”

I held his gaze with the specific, direct attention I gave to every threat that had not yet fully declared itself, until he looked away.

At night, the dreams came back with the patient, incremental force of water finding the crack it was always going to find.

The final one came at the end of the week with the heightened vividness of a thing that had been building pressure. I stood at the edge of a cliff, the moon pouring silver light across my shoulders, the drop below absolute and dark.

Malrik appeared behind me. His voice was barely more than breath against the back of my neck. “You can be so much more, Isla. If only you’d let go.”

The pull of it was physical, the specific, engineered pull of a dream designed to use every vulnerability I had worked a year to close. My children’s weight against my palms. The cliff’s edge. The voice behind me saying release.

I did not step forward, which was the only decision that mattered and the one the dream had been built to undo.

I turned. It was not the response the dream had been designed for, and the fact that I could choose it was its own answer.

I turned in the dream the way I turned in every fight, with the full deliberate weight of a woman who had made her decision before the moment of contact.

I looked at Malrik’s face in the moonlight with the cold attention I gave to every threat I was not yet ready to name but had already decided I would destroy.

Then I woke, and the decision I had made in the dream stayed in my chest, dense and certain.

My breath came short. My hands were pressed flat to my stomach. The room was dark and Draven was beside me, and the dream’s residue sat on my chest with the concrete weight of a thing that had not finished arriving.

I turned to Draven. I pressed my hand to his arm and let the contact bring me fully back into the room, back into the body that was here rather than the one that had been standing at a cliff edge.

“I think something’s wrong.” My voice shook and I let it, because he needed to hear the true register rather than the managed one.

I did not need to perform calm for him. I needed him to hear the truth: the dreams were not random. Malrik was not what he presented. Whatever was being done to me in the hours I slept was deliberate and had been specifically designed for me, and I needed it stopped.

I had survived the chain and the arena and my father’s hands and my sister’s cruelty and three miles of dark forest barefoot. I was not going to be unmade in my sleep by a man who had never had to fight for anything with his body.

I needed Draven to know what was happening, and I needed to say it out loud so that it existed in the room and not only in the dark space behind my closed eyes.

And then I needed us to end it, because I was not going to let whatever was being sent into my sleep reach my children.