Luna Forsaken (Arya and James) novel Chapter 199

199 You Lost Everything for Nothing

James’s POVO

When the guard knocked on my office door, I almost told him to go away. Not because I

was busy. These days every interruption seemed to come carrying another piece of bad

news, another crack in the walls I had spent years building around Nightwind. The pack

was still standing, yes. The borders still held. Patrols still moved. Men still answered

when I gave orders. But it all felt different now. Thinner. Like the whole pack could sense

what I had only recently begun to understand. Power built on a lie never stays steady for

long.

“Come in,” I said anyway.

The door opened, and one of the inner guards stepped in. His posture was too stiff for

anything ordinary.

“Alpha.”

I looked up from the reports on my desk.

“What?”

“Alpha Maxwell has arrived.”

For a second, I thought I heard wrong. My body reacted before my mind did. My spine

straightened. My pulse kicked. My breath caught just enough to irritate me.

“Maxwell?”

“Yes, Alpha. He’s at the outer receiving point now.”

I stood too fast, the chair scraping harshly over the floorboards behind me.

Maxwell.

Here.

In Nightwind.

After all my calls. After all my messages. After the silence. After every delayed answer

and every answer that was not really an answer at all.

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Too many thoughts hit me at once, but only one mattered first.

“Arya,” I said before I could stop myself. “Did she come with him?”

The guard blinked, already looking unsure whether he was even meant to answer that.

Before he could start fumbling through it, Nixon stepped in behind him. He must have

come the moment he heard Maxwell’s convoy at the gate. He looked at my face once

and knew exactly what I had asked.

“She didn’t come,” he said.

The words landed slow and deep, like a blade pushed in with boring patience.

For a second, I did not move.

I had known she might not come. I had told myself she would not. I had told myself

again and again that if Maxwell ever agreed to see me, he would be wise enough not to

bring her anywhere near me before she was ready.

And still, some stupid starving part of me had hoped.

Hoped I would see her stepping out of one of Dragonclaw’s cars with her shoulders

squared and her chin lifted and her eyes full of that rage I had earned. Hoped she would

at least be close enough for me to know she was breathing under the same sky.

Instead all I got was her absence.

That was fitting.

I had taken her presence for granted so completely when it was mine to protect that

maybe absence was all I deserved now. The thought hit harder than it should have

because it was true.

I turned away from Nixon so he would not see too much of what passed over my face.

“Right,” I said, and even to me my voice sounded wrong. “Fine.”

It was not fine. But disappointment was a luxury, and shame had become an old

companion. I picked up my jacket from the back of the chair and forced myself to move.

“Get the receiving hall ready. Refreshments, not a full spread. Security stays visible but

not insulting. No crowding.”

“It’s already being done,” Nixon said.

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Of course it was. Nixon had started compensating for my mistakes before I even

understood the full size of them. I dragged a hand over my face once and headed for the

door.

As I walked, I pulled myself back into shape the only way I knew how. Maxwell was

here. Maxwell had come. Whatever his reasons, this was not the time to stand in my

office thinking about a woman who had every right to hate me.

By the time I reached the outer receiving hall, my face was composed.

The rest of me was not.

Nightwind’s receiving hall was not grand in the way old Union packs built theirs. No

carved ancestral wolves. No polished marble meant to impress generations of honoured

guests. Ours was newer. Strong timber. Broad windows. Stone flooring laid for

endurance instead of display. Arya had once said she liked that about it. Said too many

pack halls looked like men were decorating for themselves instead of building anything

useful.

That memory hit me the moment I reached the threshold.

I ignored it and kept walking.

Maxwell stood near the middle of the room when I entered, his hands clasped behind his

back, his broad shoulders filling the space with that quiet authority powerful men carry

without trying. He had not brought a ridiculous number of men, which told me he had

come to talk and not posture. Still, the men he had brought were enough to make the

point clearly.

Dragonclaw travelled properly.

Rusty stood a little behind and to the right, his expression unreadable in that way good

security men perfected. Two more Dragonclaw wolves waited near the door, watchful

and silent. Nixon had placed ours with equal care, visible, respectful, not provocative.

Maxwell turned when I approached.

He did not smile.

He did not offer any of the warmth he might once have given me before all this. Before

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