Finally Found it 73

POV: Seraphine

Three days out of Crimson Fang’s prison and people were still saying her name, which meant I had traveled three days and arrived nowhere new.

I had heard it twice on the road here, from wolves passing in the opposite direction who did not know me. Their voices carried that particular reverence of strangers trading legends.

The vanished Luna. The white wolf. The one who shifted under the full moon with the whole pack watching. As if disappearing made a person more remarkable rather than simply absent.

I pressed my thumbnail into my palm and kept walking. She was gone. They were still chasing her ghost. That was their problem, not mine.

The Obsidian Howl stronghold crouched at the end of a switchback road, its gates black iron, twice the height of any wolf standing guard.

Sentries occupied the shadows on either side, eyes catching the moonlight and returning it cold. Low growls moved through their chests as I came up the road, testing me.

I met them with a smirk. My crescent mark pulsed faintly against my cheek in the cold air, and I watched the nearest sentry’s attention lock to it and stay.

“Let me see him,” I told the dark between them, and waited while they made their calculation.

One broke from the line and disappeared inside. The iron gates groaned open thirty seconds later. I walked through without waiting for an escort.

The chamber beyond was everything Tobias would build for himself. Black stone, torchlight designed for atmosphere over visibility, a throne carved from the same dark rock as the walls.

Everything positioned so that anyone entering had to cross a long expanse of empty floor first. A performance of power I recognized because I had staged smaller versions myself.

Tobias lounged in the throne with the ease of someone who had spent considerable time deciding how he looked while doing nothing.

His sharp features were half in shadow, and his eyes were on me before I finished my first step inside.

His lips curled when he saw me. “Well, well,” he drawled, letting the words roll out slow. “What do we have here? Crimson Fang’s little snake slithering into my den? Didn’t they teach you loyalty, Seraphine? Or was betrayal always your forte?”

I crossed the floor toward him. My chin was level, my pace unhurried, because the distance between those gates and his throne was a test and I had not come this far to fail a test.

“Loyalty is for those who lack vision,” I told him. “And I see far more clearly than Draven ever could.”

He tilted his head, reading me the way men read assets. “You’ve got guts showing up here. What’s the matter? Crimson Fang’s dungeons weren’t to your liking?”

“I have more than guts.” I stopped at a distance I chose, not the one he had arranged, and kept my voice level and flat.

“I have knowledge — of Crimson Fang, its weaknesses, and Draven’s precious Luna.” One beat of silence, long enough to land. “Make me your Luna, and I’ll give you everything.”

His laugh came out rich and cold. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, eyes sharpening with the specific attention of a man who had not been genuinely surprised recently. “Ambition suits you, Seraphine. But I don’t make promises lightly. What makes you think I need you?”

I did not blink. I did not shift my weight. I gave him none of the tells he was cataloguing.

“Because you know what I’m capable of. Draven underestimated me, and look where that got him.” The torches guttered in the draft from the gate behind me. “With me by your side, you’ll not only destroy Crimson Fang — you’ll rule every pack in the region.”

He studied me with an expression arranged into unreadable. Nearly unreadable. I had spent my entire life reading what men arranged into faces, and beneath the performance of skepticism was interest, running clean and certain.

A smile pulled across his mouth. He rose from the throne and circled me slowly, taking his time, reading me from every angle. I tracked him with my eyes only and kept my feet planted, because turning to follow him was submission and I had not come here to submit.

“Bold words,” he finished, completing the circle and returning to face me. “Let’s see if you’re worth it.”

Every person in my life had run this same calculation. Every one of them had landed on the same answer. Every one of them had been wrong.

“I’ve already proven myself once,” I told him, holding his stare without flinching. “I infiltrated Crimson Fang’s inner circle, wore their Luna’s face for three days.” I held his stare without flinching.

“That is what I am capable of. Imagine what I do when I am working for you.”

He leaned close. His voice dropped to the register of a threat pressed directly into the ear.

“Prove your loyalty to me, Seraphine. And if you succeed…” His lips curved with the satisfaction of someone who believed he was being generous. “I’ll make you a queen.”

The word settled in the torchlight between us, waiting to see what I would do with it.

I had received better offers. I had received worse. The value of any offer was never in the word itself but in the position it granted you to negotiate the one that followed.

I held his stare and let the silence extend until it belonged to me rather than him. Then I smiled, slow and deliberate, and let him wonder what exactly he had just agreed to.

Outside these walls, the wolves on the road were still passing her name between them. Isla this, Isla that.

The vanished Luna, the miracle shift, the white wolf who appeared under the full moon and then disappeared entirely, leaving nothing behind but a story people could not stop repeating.

She was gone and they still could not release her name, and that had to change before anything else could.

Whatever Tobias needed, whatever the cost of this alliance, whatever I had to prove or perform or dismantle to earn my position here — when it was finished, the only name traveling these roads would be mine.

I was done being the chapter people skipped on the way to hers. That story was over. A new one was starting now, and I intended to be the only person in it.