Finally Found it 61

POV: Isla

The packhouse hummed with dread before the summons was even read aloud. Wolves moved through the corridors in tight clusters, their voices stripped to urgent murmurs, their bodies carrying the collective tension of a pack bracing for a threat it could not yet see.

Tobias. The name had been passing through Crimson Fang all morning, handed from wolf to wolf with the care you afford to things that might detonate.

He was not a rumor. The Obsidian Howl Alpha was a record of damage — wolves who had survived contact with his magic bore the proof behind their eyes for the rest of their lives, auras permanently stained, wills no longer fully their own.

The stories circulating the halls were not exaggerated. They were warnings, dressed as stories because no one had found a cleaner container for that level of horror.

Some wolves spoke of alphas whose mates had been bound to Tobias through blood-spells, forced to renounce their bonds while their true mates tore themselves apart from the inside.

Others described defectors dragged before an obsidian altar and broken open until they howled their loyalty through bloodied mouths. I had heard enough of them to understand exactly what we were walking toward.

In the great hall, Draven stood before the assembled pack and the room absorbed his presence the way it always did: completely and without delay. The murmurs died. Every wolf in the space oriented toward him.

I took my position at his side, silver hair catching the torchlight, and held my face still.

“The council believes they can test us,” Draven said, his voice cutting through the remaining noise without strain. “They think we are weak. They think we are divided. We will show them otherwise.”

His amber eyes moved over the gathered wolves in a slow, deliberate sweep that dared anyone to voice disagreement aloud.

Micah’s words came from near the front, direct and unguarded. “What happens if they do not believe us? What if they side with Tobias?”

“Then they will regret underestimating us.”

Alaric had been leaning against a nearby column with his arms folded, the posture of a man who observes before he commits.

His attention had been tracking the hall the whole time, reading it the way rogues learn to read every unfamiliar space they enter.

“Bold. But Tobias does not play fair, does he? He is not interested in diplomacy — he is setting you up to fall.”

“And yet here you are,” Draven returned, the cut in his tone precise and unhurried, “standing with us instead of running back to your rogue ways.”

“Call it self-preservation,” Alaric replied, though the sharpness beneath the ease of it pointed toward a loyalty he had not yet put into words.

I was tracking the exchange when the guard crossed the hall toward me. “Seraphine has requested a meeting with you.”

The muscle at Draven’s jaw shifted. “She is always scheming,” he muttered.

“She is still my sister.” I did not say it to soften anything. I said it because it was accurate, and accuracy did not require sentiment.

The cell sat at the lower level of the packhouse, flanked by two wolves who watched me with the wariness of guards who had been briefed on exactly what the woman behind those bars was capable of. I understood the wariness. I had spent seventeen years living inside it.

Seraphine had arranged herself for an audience. She sat at the center of the cell, posture composed, crescent mark faintly luminous at her cheek.

She looked the way she always looked when she wanted you to believe she was in control: effortful stillness wearing the costume of ease. Her face released nothing.

“Sister,” she said, her voice carrying a deliberate and unusual calm. “There is a force plotting against you and Draven. They have been working in the shadows for years. Let me help you, and I will tell you everything.”

I folded my arms and leaned against the doorframe. I did not step inside. The distance between us was the only honest thing in the space.

“You have lost the right to call yourself my sister. If there is a threat, speak plainly, but do not think for a moment I will trade your freedom for another web of lies.”

The composed surface fractured. Just enough. Her eyes darkened, and the careful calm she had constructed frayed visibly at the edges, the desperation underneath it pressing through.

“You are making a mistake. You think you can do this alone, but you will see: when they come for you, you will wish you had listened to me.”

“No. I will wish I had not wasted my time here.”

I turned and walked out. The silence behind me was dense and furious and entirely hers to sit in.

I did not feel relief walking away from her. I had stopped expecting relief from anything involving her years ago.

What I felt was the familiar, bone-deep exhaustion of a woman who has spent her entire life being pulled back into orbit around someone who does not deserve the gravity.

Back in the great hall, the pack had shifted into preparation. Supplies were organized, weapons checked. The low collective tension of wolves readying for real danger occupied every corner.

It had a different texture than ordinary fear: the particular alertness of a pack that had been tested recently and understood the next test was already in motion.

A warrior near the back gave voice to what most of them were already thinking. “The Obsidian Howl’s magic is not just rumors. They say Tobias can control minds, twist bonds—”

“Enough!” Draven’s command cracked across the hall and the space went still around it.

He stood to his full height, his amber eyes moving over the assembled wolves with a precision that left no opening for retreat.

“We do not cower from myths or manipulators. Remember who you are. Remember who I am.”

The unease did not vanish. It pulled back from the surface, wolves straightening, the pack’s collective bearing shifting from dread toward the hard, focused readiness of people who have made their choice and intend to hold it.

I caught Draven’s eye across the hall. He gave me a small nod, brief and contained, the kind that carries more than its size suggests.

Then we led the pack forward into what was coming, and I kept my face steady and did not let it reveal that I was not certain any of us were fully ready for what that would require.