Finally Found it 92

POV: Isla

The door to Draven’s quarters swung open and I stopped.

I had been in this room during strategy sessions and arguments and the specific charged silences that had no clean name. I knew its corners and textures. I knew the way the firelight moved across the stone walls when the hour was late.

I did not know this.

Candles on every surface, their flames throwing gold across the dark wood and the thick furs, across rose petals scattered in a path from the threshold inward.

The air carried the roses before I saw them. I stood in the doorway and took it in without rushing toward it.

“Draven?”

He emerged from the shadows near the hearth, broad-shouldered and unhurried, amber eyes finding mine across the candlelit distance and staying there.

I had watched those eyes go hard in council, go cold on the battlefield. Now they were neither.

He let me look. He did not fill the silence.

“It is for you,” he said, his voice carrying the low, deliberate steadiness I had learned was not the absence of feeling but the presence of it, held carefully. He stepped toward me. “For us. For what we are building.”

My eyes moved across the room again: the candles, the petals, the table set by the fire with food and a small bouquet of wildflowers.

“You did all this?” I asked, and my voice came out quieter than I intended.

A small nod. A rare, unguarded pull at the corner of his mouth. “You have given me more than I ever thought I deserved, Isla. I wanted to give you a return, even if it is just a moment to celebrate.”

My hands went to my stomach before I had decided to move them. The gesture had been happening without permission for weeks, the body knowing before the mind had fully accepted the knowing.

“Draven,” I said, and nothing else came.

He crossed the remaining distance and took my hands in his. His grip was warm and certain in the way everything about him was certain, the way that had stopped frightening me and started anchoring me at some point I could not precisely name.

“You have changed everything,” he said. The roughness in his voice was not performance. I had spent enough time watching him perform calm in front of others to know the real thing when I heard it.

“You have given me purpose beyond duty. A family. A reason to fight harder than I already was.”

Then he knelt.

The Alpha of Crimson Fang went down before me and rested his hands against my abdomen with a gentleness that had no business belonging to the same body that had driven its claws through Tobias on the battlefield.

“I swear to you,” he said, low and raw and absolute, “I will protect you and our children with everything I have. Nothing will touch you, nothing will harm you. Not while I draw breath.”

My vision blurred. I stood with the tears pressing at the edges of my eyes and looked down at him: this difficult, immovable, extraordinary man on his knees in the candlelight.

I let myself feel what that produced in me without flinching from it.

I had spent years learning to flinch. Learning to make myself small enough to pass through rooms without drawing damage.

Learning to receive cruelty as though it were weather, impersonal and unavoidable. What I had not learned was how to stand inside tenderness without bracing against it.

It was a harder habit to unlearn than I had expected.

I cupped his face in my hands. My thumbs moved across the stubble of his jaw. “You already do, Draven,” I whispered. “You always have.”

He pressed his forehead to my stomach and closed his eyes. The fire crackled in the silence.

I stood with my hands in his hair and let the moment be what it was: not a battle to win, not a test to pass, not a proof of anything to anyone.

Just this.

When he rose, he guided me toward the table by the fire. Plates of fruit and bread waited alongside the wildflowers. He poured water and handed the glass to me with the specific amusement of a man withholding commentary.

“Micah would have my head if I let you have anything stronger,” he said.

The laugh that came out of me was not a polite one. It was real and unguarded and I watched him register it with that contained warmth he had been showing me in increments for months.

We ate. The weight of everything that had come before these weeks: the battlefield, the council, Seraphine’s face behind the bars, Kael’s still form in the dirt — did not disappear, but it receded to the right distance.

Draven’s laughter came easily tonight, which was not a thing it usually did. I told him he was impossible. He told me I was infuriating.

“And yet somehow,” he said, leaning closer across the table, “you make everything feel worth it.”

I did not deflect it with wit. I let it sit between us and stayed with it.

Later, he drew me to the thick furs in front of the fire and pulled me into his lap, his arms settling around me with the confidence of a man who has stopped pretending he does not want exactly this.

“You are my everything, Isla,” he murmured against the top of my head. “And now, so are they.” His hand moved to rest against my stomach, his thumb tracing slow, reverent circles that held in them everything he was not yet equipped to say at full volume.

I tilted my head back and found his eyes. The firelight caught the amber in them and held it, and what I saw there was not the Alpha, not the strategist, not the man who ran calculations behind every expression.

Just him. Choosing this. Choosing me.

I had not expected to be chosen. Not really. I had walked into Crimson Fang expecting to survive it, maybe to earn my ground there if I fought hard enough and bled the right amount and proved I was not the liability everyone expected a rogue Luna to be.

I had not walked in expecting to find a man who would kneel in candlelight with his hands against the place where our children were growing and swear himself to me with the same absolute conviction he brought to every other decision he had ever made.

I had not known I was waiting for that until it happened.

“And you are mine,” I said, my voice steady in the way I had learned to make it steady: not by suppressing what moved beneath it, but by letting it move and standing firm anyway. “No matter what comes, we will face it together.”

His arms tightened around me. The fire burned down slowly, and neither of us moved to tend it.