Finally Found it 90

POV: Isla

The footsteps reached me before he did, heavy and deliberate, the sound of a man who had stopped running and started closing in on a destination.

Draven emerged from the shadows still mid-shift, his black fur slick with blood that was not all his own. His amber eyes burned with the fury of a wolf who had been fighting for hours and had not yet decided to stop.

His gaze found Seraphine on the ground. Then it found me, and the air between us changed.

“You are hesitating again,” he growled, his voice sharp and unforgiving. “We are not doing this again, Isla. She dies.”

I turned to face him fully, planting my feet. My heart was hammering but my body did not move. “Draven,” I said, keeping my voice level. “She is pregnant.”

His expression did not change. His claws flexed at his sides, his amber eyes blazing. “I do not care. She is too dangerous to live.”

He stepped forward. His claws hovered inches from Seraphine’s throat, and the air between us compressed with the force of everything he was holding back.

“Draven, stop.” My voice cut through the space, firm and trembling in equal measure. I moved into the gap, pressing both hands flat against his chest.

He was breathing hard, his wolf barely restrained beneath his skin, the heat of him pressing through my palms. “We cannot kill her. Not like this.”

His chest heaved against my hands. “She has lied, manipulated, and betrayed us,” he growled, the words coming from somewhere deep and guttural. “This is not just justice, Isla. It is survival.”

I glanced over my shoulder at Seraphine. She lay crumpled on the ground, one hand pressed to her abdomen, her crescent mark dim and faded at her cheek.

Her eyes were open and watching, and the defiant glint in them told me she was still calculating.

Still reading. Still finding angles in the wreckage she had made of herself. “She is pregnant,” I said again, and this time I was not saying it for Draven.

“And you believe her?” Draven snarled, his jaw tightening. “You have seen what she is capable of. This could be another one of her games.”

I held his gaze and did not move my hands from his chest. “If she is lying, we will know soon enough. But if she is not, Draven, we cannot kill an innocent life. No matter who the mother is.”

The fury on his face did not abate. He was not wrong, and we both knew it. I had felt every knife Seraphine had buried in me over the years — every manipulation dressed as coincidence, every cruelty packaged as concern. I carried no illusions about what she was.

But I knew what I was, and I had spent too many years fighting to stay that person to surrender it here, in a field, with a blade already drawn. Those two things were not the same, and I was not going to let them become the same.

“This is not just about her, Isla!” Draven’s voice broke through with the force of a man who had been holding it back for too long.

“How many times will you let her twist your compassion into a weapon? How many more lives will she destroy because we showed her mercy?”

The words landed. I let them, because dismissing their weight would have been dishonest.

“She is my sister,” I said. The rawness in my voice was not a performance. “And this child did not choose her as a mother. We lock her away, Draven. No mercy, no freedom. But we do not kill her child.”

He stared at me. The fury was still there, but beneath it I could see him searching, looking for the thing that would either hold him or break him, and I stood still and let him find it in my face.

He exhaled sharply. His claws retracted. He took one step back, and the quality of the air between us shifted. His voice dropped to a low and dangerous register. “One more chance, Isla. For you. Not for her.”

The relief that moved through me was not clean. It arrived already knowing its price. I turned to Seraphine.

She was watching me with that smirk at the corner of her mouth, faint and worn but present, her crescent mark dim at her cheek. She looked exactly as she always had — a woman already tallying what she might still leverage from the ruins around her.

“You will be taken back to Crimson Fang and locked away,” I told her, my voice flat and cold. “Your child will be born in captivity. You will have no influence, no voice, no chance to manipulate anyone again.”

Seraphine let out a breathless sound that held the shape of a laugh. “Such a benevolent Luna,” she murmured, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Always playing the savior.”

I looked at her. At the face that had been across from mine at a thousand meals, that had watched me crawl back up from every place it helped push me down.

I looked at the mark carved into her cheek, the copy of mine without origin, without cost. I felt nothing that resembled warmth and nothing that resembled hate. I felt cold and final and entirely clear.

“Do not mistake compassion for weakness,” I said. “You will get no more chances, Seraphine. This is it.”

Draven motioned to the warriors at the perimeter, his jaw tight, his eyes never leaving Seraphine as they moved toward her. His voice was quiet and absolute. “If she so much as breathes out of turn, end it. I will not risk her life at the expense of this pack again.”

Then he pulled me in close, his mouth near my ear, his voice dropping to barely above a whisper. “I hope you are right about this, Isla. Because if you are not, I will not stop next time.”

I pressed my forehead against his chest and kept my eyes on Seraphine’s retreating silhouette. My heart was still pounding. The full weight of what I had just done was settling into my bones, displacing nothing, adding itself to everything else I was already carrying.

“I know,” I whispered back. “But I could not live with myself if I did not try.”

He held me, and the battlefield held its breath around us, and I watched until Seraphine was entirely gone from sight.

I did not feel victorious. I did not feel as though I had saved anyone. I felt the particular weight of a person who had stood at the exact edge of who she was and refused to step over it, not for Seraphine’s sake but for her own.

Becoming her was the one thing I had always refused. It was the one line I had drawn and held through every room and every year and every cruelty she had sent in my direction. I had held it tonight too, and I was going to have to live with whether that was enough.