Finally Found it 21

POV: Isla

The training ground had gone quiet around me before I finished registering that it had ever been full.

They had been there when I arrived, a cluster of young she-wolves at the edge of the field, voices low, bodies close.

I had walked toward them with the specific intention of being useful: defense, leverage, how to survive a fight with less size and less wolf than the person across from you.

Everything I had learned the hard way, offered freely.

They turned away. One at a time, systematic, until I was standing in the middle of an empty field with the cooling evening air on my face and nowhere to direct the thing building in my chest.

I swallowed it down and held the line. ‘It does not matter.’ I will earn their trust eventually.

I did not entirely believe it yet. I kept the position anyway. That was how the thing worked.

Heavy footsteps behind me. A presence I would have known in a room with my eyes closed.

Draven came to a stop beside me. Said nothing. I felt his gaze move across the empty field, then settle on me: the unhurried attention of a man who has already made his decision and is observing the evidence.

“See me in my chamber.” Low and steady. An order that did not dress itself as anything else.

My heart moved in my chest. I turned to look at him, but his expression was already closed, dark and unwavering.

I did not argue. I turned and followed him into the corridor.

His chamber was dim, candlelight moving along the stone walls in slow patterns, the fire burning low. I crossed the threshold and heard the door settle behind me.

Draven moved to the window, arms crossed, the tension in him contained beneath the surface of a posture that looked relaxed to anyone who had not been watching him for weeks.

“The pack still doubts you.” His voice was calm and heavy in equal measure, each word placed with care.

I took a slow breath. “But I won the trial. That was supposed to prove my worth.”

His gaze moved to mine and locked there with the particular weight of a man who has already decided the conversation. “They need to see your wolf, Isla.”

The silence stretched between us, taut and unresolved, and I made no effort to fill it.

“Tell me the truth.” His voice dropped, quiet but firm, leaving no space for deflection. “You have not shifted yet, have you?”

My fingers tightened around the fabric of my sleeves. The truth was already in the room — had been since the council session, since I woke from four days of unconsciousness and reached inward and found the absence.

Tears rose before I could stop them. I blinked hard, lifted my chin, kept my eyes on his.

“It just won’t end, will it?” My voice cracked on the edge of it, frustration breaking through. “I will have to keep proving myself. Again and again.”

Draven crossed to me before I had finished deciding whether I wanted him to, and I did not move away.

His fingers brushed my cheek, the touch warm and unhurried, and he wiped the tear that had slipped free before I had managed to stop it. I bit my lip without my recollection and watched him catch that simple moment.

“Stop that,” he murmured.

I looked up and found his face considerably closer than I had registered it being. “Stop what?”

His thumb grazed slowly across my lower lip and stayed there. “Biting your lips.”

My breath caught and held and all the prepared words dissolved in the same instant.

I opened my mouth to push back, to say the word that would restore the distance between us. I never got there.

His mouth came down on mine with a force that dissolved every prepared sentence in my head.

He kissed me rough and hungry, his tongue past my teeth before I had finished processing the fact of contact, and he tasted like sin and stolen whiskey and I stopped thinking in sequential order.

His hands gripped my waist and pulled me against the full length of him. I could feel every hard line of his body, feel him already half-hard against my stomach.

The heat between us was electric. I was drowning in it. My hands dug into his shirt like I intended to remove it immediately.

He did not give me air. His lips were on mine again, sucking and biting and taking.

His hands moved across my body with the authority of someone who has already decided it belongs to him. One hand fisted in my hair.

He pulled my head back. Teeth at my pulse point, marking. I gasped and drove my nails into his shoulders.

He walked me backward. The edge of the table found the backs of my thighs and then he was lifting me onto it, stepping between my legs in one continuous motion.

His hands pushed my thighs apart and his fingers found the waistband of my underwear and pulled it down in one motion, and his mouth was on my neck, and I moaned and tangled my hands in his hair.

“Draven—” My voice came out unsteady, and I did not finish the sentence because I had not decided what the sentence was going to be.

He answered with a smirk pressed against my inner thigh, his breath hot and deliberate, and the smirk carried everything the words would have said.

“Let me taste you,” he growled, voice dark and low, and then his mouth was on me.

His tongue moved through me slowly and deliberately and I nearly came off the table. He worked my clit, circling and teasing until I was arching against him, hips lifting, searching.

He laughed. The sound was dark and filthy against my skin. Then he was consuming me like he had been waiting for exactly this and had exhausted his patience for waiting.

His fingers pushed inside me, curling to find the exact right angle, and I was soaked and shaking and he knew it and he did not slow down.

“Fuck, you taste so good,” he groaned against me, his breath hot as he sucked my clit into his mouth, and I nearly came apart.

My thighs closed around him, hands gripping the table edge like it was the only anchor available.

“Draven — I am going to —” I gasped it out, hands gripping the table edge, but he did not stop.

His tongue moved and his fingers worked and I shattered, my orgasm breaking over me in waves I had not braced for. My body shook with it.

I cried out his name and kept crying it as the waves moved through me, one after another, until I was trembling and undone and boneless against the surface.

He did not stop immediately. He drew it out, every last tremor, until I was wrecked and panting and entirely unmade above him. Only then did he pull back.

He pulled back and looked up at me from where he knelt, his eyes dark, his lips wet with me.

“You’re perfect,” he growled, licking his lips like he couldn’t get enough.

His hands pressed slowly up my thighs, and the look he gave me was a promise with teeth in it.

“I can’t wait to take your clothes off.” His voice was rough, unhurried, the tone of a man who has already decided.