CHAPTER 72: _ AWAKENING CEREMONY (ISOLDE)

Darien moves to step around the girls, but Isolde catches his sleeve, halting him. "Don’t be rude," she hisses, then to the girls: "Yes, you can have a moment."

They beam, encouraged by her friendliness. A particularly beautiful girl with honey-colored curls and soft hazel eyes is clearly pushed forward by the others. She fidgets with the hem of her gown, cheeks burning pink as she forces herself to speak.

"I... I was wondering, Darien... would you..." she swallows hard, clutching her necklace like it might anchor her courage, "would you be my date for the ball tonight?"

YES! Isolde internally jubiliates. Finally, her brother gets to attend the ball. The ball’s not just for pretty dresses and awkward dancing, you know. They built it on fortified ground, which sort of... speeds things up for wolves who are fated. If your mate’s in the ballroom, the aura there makes it easier to lock onto them. Doesn’t mean you can’t find your mate anywhere else, it’s just... here it happens faster.

Like turning the volume up on a radio until the signal clears and Isolde herself kind of looks forward to it.

The girl’s friends lean forward expectantly and so does Isolde.

However Darien doesn’t even look at the girl. "No."

He says it so flatly, brutally, and with finality before he keeps walking. The girl wilts instantly, shrinking back as though she’s been slapped. Her friends gasp in outrage, but none dares call after him.

Oh, by the gods. Isolde mentally slaps her own forehead. Her brother’s a gone case, she thinks.

Isolde pauses, softening her voice as she touches the girl’s arm. "I’m sorry. He’s... well. You’ll have better luck with someone who actually deserves you. Good luck finding your mate."

The girl sniffles a thank-you, and Isolde hurries to catch up with her brother.

As they fall back into step, Isolde studies him with new weight. She’s used to Darien being cold, but there’s something else under his skin tonight.

She shakes her head. "You know, you could try saying no without turning into a brick wall. Just a thought."

Darien mutters, "Waste of breath."

"You mean, a waste of compassion?"

He doesn’t answer, but the shadows in his eyes deepen.

Isolde continued to study him with a probing gaze. She knows him better than most. His coldness isn’t natural—it’s sculpted. Chiseled into him by the harsh hand of their mother.

She blames the woman.

Ines Bellamy, the queen of masks, terror in silk, and the most powerful of Tobias’s wives, the one even the other Luna candidates fear. She doesn’t tolerate weakness. She doesn’t tolerate love that might threaten her throne. She will quietly erase anything—or anyone—that might.

She’d raised them under the iron rule that family comes first, that status is everything, that weakness is erased before it spreads.

Darien learned the lesson too well. He carved away warmth, sympathy, tenderness, and anything that could be used against him. Now he’s a fortress with no doors and windows.

Their mother would be proud.

Isolde isn’t.

As they near the staircase leading to the suites, her thoughts drift to her own goals. Isolde... well, she’s been surviving their mother by cloaking herself in gothic lace and irony, making herself too strange to cage.

But deep down, she wants out.

Not out like Darien who chooses to be icy cold and hollow, and stuck within the walls of power. No, she wants freedom.

She wants a mate. Not for the romance novels her sister hoards, but for escape. A mate means leverage. With a mate, she can leave the pack without her father chaining her back. She can tour the world, see beyond the walls of Duskwind, and taste freedom on foreign winds.

She doesn’t care if her mate is low-born. She’ll take a baker, a carpenter, even a scrappy Omega with dirt under his nails—so long as he’ll walk with her into the wide world.

But her mother... her mother would never allow it. If Isolde’s mate isn’t high-class, her mother will erase him before the moon rises twice.

So, for the sake of peace, Isolde prays. She prays to the Moon Goddess for a mate who is powerful enough to withstand her mother. High-born enough to survive the scrutiny. Someone who will not be ripped from her arms before they’ve even had a chance.

She glances at Darien who is still basking in gloom. For all his walls, he’s still her brother. Still part of this suffocating cage. And though she won’t admit it aloud, she aches for both of them—for herself and for him.

"Darien," she says softly. "Talk to me. What’s wrong?"

Darien doesn’t answer as he drags himself through the wide marble hallway like a condemned man on his way to the gallows. His shoulders are sagging, jacket half undone. Isolde watches him with wide eyes, incredulous that her brother—the brother who can hold his own in a duel, keep a straight face in front of a council of Elders, and win over even the most stone-hearted instructors, looks like a toddler overdue for a nap.

He sighs, long and dramatic, as if the oxygen in the academy air itself is poisonous.

"I’ll be better once I get into the suite and collapse. I’m so tired of this day already. Not to mention..." He lifts his hand limply, as if even words cost too much effort, "...we still have two more days before the whole awakening ceremony ends. Two. Whole. Days. Isolde, I don’t know if I’ll survive."

Survive what exactly? Isolde wants to ask, but she decides not to overprobe him.

Instead, she stops dead in her tracks, skirts swishing around her legs. She stares at him as though he’s grown a second head, or worse, committed the kind of crime that should get one instantly exiled from the pack.

"You’re not going to the ball?" she blurts out, her voice pitching high enough that a passing junior flinches and jumps out of his second-hand shoes.

Darien doesn’t even dignify her tone with a reaction. He simply keeps walking, muttering something under his breath about pillows, warm showers, and silence.

Isolde narrows her eyes. "Darien, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten that Mother specifically wants you to find your mate during this ceremony?"

That gets a twitch out of him—just a little one, at the corner of his mouth. He still doesn’t stop, though, still trudges forward like a soldier returning from a warzone.

"I know," he says. Just that.

Two words.

But those two words hit Isolde harder than if he’d hurled a boulder at her. She gapes at him, her feet planted to the glossy tiles while he takes two more steps ahead. "You know?"

"Yes," he answers again, not even glancing back.

Isolde nearly explodes because of her brother but her wolf bristles inside her, already grumbling like a storm cloud ready to burst as she mutters.

"We are close, Isolde. I sense our mate."