Finally Found it 98

POV: Draven

The map on the war room table had not changed since I laid it out three hours ago, but the territory it represented had.

Someone had crossed into Crimson Fang, reached the inner hall, and gotten close enough to Isla’s goblet without a single one of my wolves seeing their face.

That was not incompetence on our part. That was precision on theirs, and it required an inside understanding of Crimson Fang.

Susan, Jamie, and Alaric stood around the table. None of them had sat down. That told me everything about where their heads were.

I moved the length of the room and back, giving the energy in my body the floor. “This wasn’t random. They knew what they were doing. And they knew Isla would drink from that goblet.”

Jamie pushed off the wall he had been holding up. “What about Seraphine?” His tone carried the skepticism of a man who had learned not to rule her out for anything. “She’s already proven she’s capable of this kind of thing.”

I stopped. “I don’t think so. Not this time.” The certainty in my gut was specific. Not reassurance but assessment.

Susan’s arms folded across her chest. “Doesn’t hurt to check,” and her tone made it clear she agreed and was checking anyway. She was right. I nodded once and left them with the map.

The underground cells were cold in the way that places built to be unpleasant go cold. Seraphine’s quarters sat at the far end, dim.

The air carried the particular weight of someone who had decided to make her captivity atmospheric. She was shackled to the wall, her crescent mark pulsing faintly in the dark.

She did not look up when I entered. She let the silence stretch until it served her purpose, and then she lifted her eyes with the deliberate pace of a woman who had decided the wait was long enough.

“Oh, my dear brother-in-law,” she drawled. “What brings you to my humble abode? Did Isla finally tire of playing saint?”

I crossed the floor until she could not look anywhere except at me. “Someone tried to kill Isla tonight.” The words came out flat, stripped of everything that was not the information itself. “And I’m here to find out if it was you.”

The smirk on her face shifted — barely, for half a second, but I was watching for exactly that — and what moved through her expression before she reassembled it was darker and less rehearsed than she had intended.

“And you think it was me?” Her tone came back wrapped in mock indignation, the performance snapping back into place. “Honestly, Draven. If I wanted Isla dead, she’d already be buried.”

The growl that moved through my chest was involuntary. She heard it, and she leaned forward the few inches her shackles permitted, voice dropping to the register she used when she wanted to ensure a point found its mark.

“You have bigger enemies than me, Alpha. If I were you, I’d be asking myself who else hates you enough to go after your precious Luna.”

I held her stare long enough to be thorough. Long enough to let her feel the weight of being studied by someone who had spent years determining when he was being lied to. She held it back, which was exactly the information I needed.

I turned and walked out. Her laughter followed me into the corridor, bright and mocking and performatively delighted. “Happy hunting!” She called after me.

The war room held exactly what I had left in it. Three faces turned when I entered.

“It wasn’t her.” I crossed to the table and dropped back into the map, picking up where I had left off.

Jamie exhaled through his nose. “Then who?” The frustration had reached his voice now.

I studied the territory markers on the table. Someone who knew our routines. Someone who knew the inner hall layout, the evening schedule, which wolf covered which position, which goblet would reach Isla’s hands.

Not a stranger guessing from outside. Someone who had watched us carefully enough to know.

“Someone who knows our routines,” I told them. “Someone who knows how to get close without being seen.”

Alaric had been quiet since I returned, which with him meant he had been working through a problem, not waiting for one.

He stepped forward and the look on his face was the specific look he wore when he had already discarded three options and landed on a fourth.

Alaric stepped forward. “If we can’t find them, maybe we should make them come to us.”

“And how do you suggest we do that?” I crossed my arms and held his stare, and waited for the part that was going to cost us.

His mouth moved into the smile that told me the answer came with a cost he had not yet named. “By giving them what they want. Whatever it is, they can’t resist.”

The room absorbed that. No one argued, which meant everyone was running the same math I was: it would work, and it would require using as bait the one thing none of us were willing to lose. That was what the silence weighed.

The door opened. I did not need to turn. I had learned to feel her presence the way a room learned the change in pressure before a storm arrived, in the body before the mind caught up.

Isla moved to the table, silver hair unbound, eyes going directly to the map with the focused attention she brought to every problem she decided was hers to solve.

She had a habit of walking into war rooms as though the invitation was implicit and the only question was where she stood.

I looked at her, and the cold operational mathematics I had been running shifted into a register that lived outside any map I had drawn.

“If it means keeping you safe,” I told her, my voice coming out lower than I had planned, “I’ll do whatever it takes.”

It was not a performance. It was the simple statement of a fact I had long since stopped trying to qualify, delivered in the only room I knew how to be honest in — a room with a problem to solve and people I trusted to solve it with.

Whatever it takes. Whatever the cost of Alaric’s plan. She was worth the arithmetic, and I had stopped pretending otherwise.