Finally Found it 94

POV: Isla

The packhouse had been stripped of war and filled with a warmth I had spent most of my life not believing I would get to feel.

Crimson and gold banners hung from every rafter, their colors burning in the light of more lanterns than I could count.

The long tables bent under roasted meats, fresh bread, and steaming vegetables, the air thick with wood smoke and spice.

I stood at the head table in a silver gown that caught the lantern light with every breath. Draven’s hand rested on my waist, warm and certain, and I let it stay.

I was pregnant with twins. I was Luna of Crimson Fang. I was standing in my own hall, wearing my own title, beside the man who had chosen me. I was alive, and I had earned every word in that sentence.

I watched the hall fill fast with wolves from neighboring packs, their voices braiding into the easy noise of people who had put down their weapons for one night.

I did not brace for an attack, which was new. I noticed it was new, and I let myself have the moment.

Elyra arrived first, her sharp eyes finding mine across the hall before she had closed half the distance. The Alpha of the Silver Moon Pack moved with the economy of a woman who has never once needed to announce herself.

She stopped before me and smiled, and the warmth in it was genuine enough to reach me. “Congratulations, Luna,” she said. “Twins are a rare blessing. Your pack must be thrilled.”

“They are,” I said, and I meant it, and the smile that came with it required no maintenance.

Elyra held my gaze a beat longer than courtesy required, reading me the way Alphas do when they respect what they find, and then she moved on. I stored that moment and kept my shoulders back.

I noted when the quality of intention changed. I read Garren of the Iron Fang Pack from the moment he crossed the hall, his bulk leading him, his smile sitting too tight on his face.

I watched him arrive at the table carrying the energy of a man who has decided in advance what he intends to take from an interaction.

“Lady Isla,” he drawled, and the condescension in it was so deliberate I could have measured it. “Carrying twins must be exhausting. Are you sure you can handle the pressure of being Luna with such… delicate responsibilities?”

The question hit the air between us. I held it there, and I knew exactly what he was doing.

I had been in rooms with versions of this man my entire life, men who dressed doubt as concern, who wrapped dismissal in the language of worry.

I had been smaller then. Quieter. I had swallowed that treatment without protest because no one had told me yet that I was allowed to refuse it.

I was not that person anymore, and Garren of the Iron Fang Pack had no idea what he had just walked into.

Draven’s hand tightened on my waist before I had finished forming my answer. His amber eyes found Garren’s with the kind of focus that does not require volume to carry weight, and the room registered it immediately.

“My mate has handled more pressure than you will see in a lifetime,” Draven said. His voice was ice, precise and flat. “She is stronger than anyone here.”

I let one beat pass. Then I placed my hand over Draven’s, felt the tension in his fingers and answered it with the steadiness in mine, and I looked at Garren the way I now look at obstacles: directly, without apology, with the full measure of what I have earned.

“Thank you for your concern, Alpha,” I said. “But I can assure you — I do not need anyone else’s approval to prove my strength.”

Garren’s chest deflated by a fraction. He produced what arranged itself into an apology and removed himself from the table, and I watched him go without satisfaction and without regret. Both would have given him more weight than he deserved.

I felt the room shift when the music found its rhythm. Wolves took to the floor in pairs, and the hall moved into celebration in the way a room does when the tension has been resolved and the night is allowed to be what it was meant to be.

Draven turned to me and held out his hand, palm up, unhurried. “Dance with me,” he said, and his voice had dropped into the register he uses only when no one else is the audience.

I laughed before I could stop it, and the sound felt foreign in the best way. “You hate dancing.”

“For you, I will endure it,” he said, and the smile that came with it was rare and genuine and entirely his, the version I had spent months learning to recognize before it was gone.

I took his hand and let him lead me onto the floor. We moved together in the way we had learned to move across every kind of terrain this year, reading each other through small adjustments, through the pressure of a hand and the angle of a shoulder.

Around us, the pack watched without the scrutiny I had once felt on my skin from every direction. This was not an evaluation. This was pride.

The music slowed. Draven brought his forehead down to rest against mine, and we stood in the center of the floor with the noise of the celebration turning soft around us.

“You are radiant,” he said, his voice thick with an honesty I knew cost him, because Draven does not give that kind of thing freely, and what it costs him is part of why it means what it means. “How did I get so lucky?”

I held his gaze and let the question sit between us with its full weight before I answered it. “It is not luck, Draven,” I said. “It is us.”

I let the night stretch on around us, warm and unhurried, the hall full of sound and light and the easy movement of a pack that had survived enough to know how to celebrate.

I had fought for this. I had bled for this. I had walked into territories that should have killed me and refused to stay down, had stood in front of every version of doubt and dismissal and my own worst fears and had not yielded.

This was what that had bought, and I held Draven’s hand on the floor and I let myself feel every piece of it without apology.