Finally Found it 67

POV: Isla

Bringing her had been my decision, and Draven had not let me forget it.

“She is dangerous, Isla.” His voice had been low in the privacy of our quarters, the measured quiet of a man controlling an argument that wanted to be louder.

“Leaving her behind risks sabotage, but taking her with us is like dragging poison into a wound.”

“She is my sister.” I had not flinched from the words, even knowing how they would land. “We will keep her restrained, guarded, but I cannot let her sit back at the pack where we cannot watch her.”

He had stopped pacing. His amber eyes settled on me with the particular weight of a man who has already run every counter-argument and knows when to accept the one he cannot defeat.

“If we take her, she will have no opportunity to scheme. She stays caged the entire trip. No exceptions.”

That had been three days ago.

Now the caravan moved through the dark and Seraphine traveled at its center, inside a steel cage reinforced with rune-etched shackles that cut her off from her shadow magic.

The night air was sharp with pine and cold earth. The guards assigned to her rotated every four hours, briefed not to engage, not to respond, not to give her a single thread to pull. None of them were asked to speak to her.

I was the one who walked toward her anyway.

The torches lining the makeshift camp threw uneven light across the bars. Seraphine sat with her back straight and her shackled wrists loosely resting on her knees, the rune markings etched into the steel casting a faint glow across her hands.

She watched me cross the distance with an expression equal parts amusement and calculation, the precise look of a woman who has been anticipating exactly this visit and prepared for it.

“You came to visit,” she said, her voice light with mock surprise. She shifted her position, reclining with deliberate ease, as though the bars around her were the arms of a throne rather than her confinement. “How touching.”

I stopped in front of the cage and crossed my arms. “What do you want, Seraphine? If this is another game, I am not interested.”

Her expression rearranged itself, the performance softening into a register designed to read as urgency.

“Sister, you do not understand. Tobias is only the beginning. There are forces at work here that neither you nor Draven can comprehend. Free me, and I will tell you everything.”

I tilted my head. The faint, humorless curve at the corner of my mouth was not a smile. It communicated precisely what a smile would not.

“You have lied to me before. Manipulated me, tried to have me killed. Why should this time be any different?”

“Because this time,” she said, dropping her voice below the hearing of the nearest guard, her eyes locking onto mine with an intensity she deployed only when she needed a result badly, “I do not want you dead. Not yet, anyway.”

The chill of those words moved through me from the base of my spine upward, deliberate and thorough. I did not step back.

I stepped forward, one unhurried pace toward the bars, close enough that she could read every detail of my face in the torchlight. I wanted her to see that it had not moved.

“You are not helping your case.”

Seraphine’s mouth hardened, the pretense of warmth abandoning her features entirely.

“You think you are safe, do you not? Sitting up there beside Draven, thinking your precious bond will shield you from everything?”

The low laugh that followed held nothing behind it. “You are more naive than I thought.”

“If there is a threat, speak plainly,” I said.

“Plainly?” She let the word breathe before continuing. “The wolves at this council, the alliances Tobias is forging — none of it matters. The real danger is the one you have not seen yet. The one lurking in the shadows you are too blind to notice.”

“Enough.” I cut across her words without raising my voice, and I watched her absorb the fact that she had not produced the reaction she was angling for.

“You are staying right where you are. Whatever game you are playing, it ends here.”

Her laughter broke from behind the bars then, too loud for the quiet of the camp, carrying past the nearest guards who exchanged uneasy glances without leaving their posts. She pressed her face toward the steel and dropped her voice to a controlled, deliberate hiss.

“Oh, Isla. The game has only just begun.”

I turned and walked away. Her laughter followed me through the camp and dissolved at the edge of the firelight. The unease she had seeded did not dissolve with it.

Draven was at the campfire with Susan and two senior warriors when I returned to the light. He read the set of my shoulders before I sat down. I had stopped pretending I could hide that from him.

“What did she say?” he asked.

I lowered myself onto the log beside him and pressed my hands together against the cold. “More riddles. More threats. I do not know if she is lying or if there is a real gap we are missing.”

His hands rested on his knees, unhurried. “She is always lying, Isla. But if she is hiding information of value, we will find it before she has a chance to use it against us.”

I stared at the fire. The flames behaved the way Seraphine always had: restless at the surface, consuming whatever lay beneath, impossible to fully read until the damage was already done.

She was lying. She had always been lying. But a woman who calculates every breath she expends does not waste a warning she cannot benefit from.

That was the part I could not set aside, the part that the darkness outside the firelight kept pushing back at me.

A log shifted in the fire. Sparks broke upward and dissolved before they cleared the ring of light.

Susan looked across the flames toward me, her expression even, the Beta’s particular quality of stillness that meant she was already three steps ahead of the current conversation. She did not speak. She was waiting to see what I would do with what I was carrying.

I was waiting to see that too.

Draven’s shoulder pressed briefly against mine, solid and deliberate, a contact that asked for nothing and offered everything it needed to.

I did not lean into it. But I did not move away.