Luna Forsaken (Arya and James) novel Chapter 148

148 Teeth Behind the Throne

Lev’s POV

Maxwell’s study smelled like cedar, old paper, and war

Not the battlefield kind.

The slower kind.

The kind fought in silence across tables, through alliances, favours, blood debts, old grudges, and names spoken carefully in the right rooms. Dragonclaw’s Alpha kept the room like he kept himself, solid, practical, difficult to impress, impossible to move once he had planted his feet on a matter.

became th

I had respected that long before I became the man people now stood when I entered a hall.

Tonight, I respected it more.

The door shut behind me with a muted click. Maxwell was already inside, pouring two drinks from al squat bottle he kept in the lower cabinet near the fire. He did not ask whether I wanted one. He knew I would not drink enough to dull myself, but he also knew I understood ritual when I saw it.

He handed me a glass.

I took it.

For a few seconds, neither of us spoke. The fire gave a low crack. Wind moved softly against the outside shutters. Somewhere deeper in the house, footsteps passed and faded.

Arya was in this house.

I could still feel her.

Not in the sentimental way poets lied about. In the sharper, more inconvenient way of a mate bond

that

had

finally stopped pretending to be a distant ache and become a live current under the skin. She

od

me in the yard like she wanted to bite through my mouth and drag the truth out at me with

her teeth. She had shaken in my arms and tried to call it anger when grief was all over her scent. She

had looked at me with those furious eyes and admitted, without saying the words, that wanting me

terrified her.

Good.

Fear meant she understood the scale of it.

I did too.

148 Teeth Behind the Throne

Maxwell leaned one hip against his desk and looked at me over the rim of his glass. His mouth twitched in a way that warned me before the words came.

“You’ve never come to Dragonclaw this often.”

I said nothing.

He took a slow sip.

“You’ve certainly never stayed this long.”

Still nothing.

The corner of his mouth pulled higher, more deliberate now. “So I’ll save us both time. You must be serious about Arya.”

I let the silence sit for one more beat, then set my glass down on the edge of the desk and met his

gaze.

“I am.”

No hesitation.

No performance.

No reason to hide it from him.

Maxwell’s expression changed, not softer, exactly, but less amused. He set his own glass down and folded his arms over his chest.

“I thought so.”

He studied me the way older Alphas studied younger ones they had once trained, measuring not strength but direction.

I had been under that look before, years ago, when I was all edge and impatience and old blood trying to outrun old expectations. Maxwell had taught me how to keep my temper sheathed long enough for people to underestimate me, and how to hit after that. He liked pretending he taught only combat.

He taught survival.

Now his gaze flicked once toward the door, as if the walls might carry whispers back to the wrong ears, and then returned to me.

“She’s drowning in rage,” he said quietly. “And still standing. That says more than most men I know.”

I looked into the fire because if I looked at him, I would answer too quickly.

<-148 Teeth Behind the Throne

When I spoke, my voice came out low and controlled. “I know what she carries.”

“No,” Maxwell said. “You know some of it.”

I glanced back at him.

He held my stare.

“When I met her,” he went on, “she was fierce. Sharp. Stubborn. Brave enough to walk through my gates half-bleeding and still keep her chin up.” His jaw tightened slightly. “But she was also… light in places. Even after hardship. She laughed faster. She moved like she trusted her own body. She had fire, yes, but no poison in it.”

The words struck harder than I expected.

Because I had not met that version first.

I had met the one forged after betrayal.

The one whose anger lived in her shoulders and jaw and fists. The one who braced before touch. The one who treated every moment of relief like a trap door waiting to give way under her weight.

The one who still burned.

Maxwell exhaled through his nose, gaze on the fire now. “What James allowed Marcel to do to her is unforgivable.”

The room went still around the sentence.

I felt my wolf stir low in my chest at James’s name, not jealous, not exactly. Something colder. Territorial in the ancient sense. A reckoning instinct. The urge to put teeth on the throat of every man who had mistaken her loyalty for something they could spend.

I picked up the glass and took one measured swallow, letting the burn settle before I answered.

“Yes.”

The word was flat.

Maxwell looked at me again. “You say that like you’re already planning funerals.”

“I’m planning consequences.”

A pause.

Then his mouth moved in a humourless almost-smile. “There he is.”

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