Luna Forsaken (Arya and James) novel Chapter 260

260 A Friend In Blackbirth 4

Arya’s POVO

Lev was leaning back slightly in his chair, one arm resting on it, but nothing in him looked careless. Lev always seemed one breath away from movement, one thought away from decision. Even here. Even now. Yet with me there was an effort to be still, to not press, to let the moment breathe.

I noticed that too.

I noticed far too much with him.

His eyes moved over the dress once more, slower now, and heat built under my skin in a way that had

nothing to do with the weather.

“The green,” he said after a moment.

I swallowed. “Tamara likes it.”

“I do too,” he said.

I should have said thank you and left it there.

Instead, I heard myself ask, “Because it looks like something Countess Vanessa would approve?”

Lev did not answer immediately.

He looked at me like he was reading something under the question. The real fear of it. The doubt. The old instinct waiting for ridicule.

Then he leaned forward slightly.

“No,” he said. “Because it looks like something you would wear when you stop asking whether you belong in the room.”

The words went straight through me.

For one dangerous second I could not breathe properly.

Nobody had ever said anything exactly like that to me before. Not because it was romantic. Though it was, in its own way. Not because it was flattering. Though it was that too. It was because he had seen the exact wound under the question and answered that instead of the dress.

I looked away first.

That was the truth of it.

Because if I had kept holding his gaze, I was not certain what he would have seen on my face.

Ria stirred warmly beneath my skin, restless and pleased and entirely too aware of the man sitting across from us.

The bond with James used to make me feel trapped these days, like I was wearing the memory of a cage over my own flesh. But whatever was growing between Lev and me felt different. Not safer exactly. Safer would have been simple. This was not simple. It was dark in its own way. Deep. Pulling.

The kind of thing a woman could fall into and never climb back out of whole. Yet there was choice in

Breath in it. The terrifying possibility of being seen and not discarded for the inconvenience.

His eyes dropped to my mouth and then lifted again.

That should have been a tiny thing. It was not.

“When choosing a dress,” he said, voice low enough to slide over my skin, “Choose whatever you like. You always look beautiful regardless.”

It was such a simple sentence.

Moon, it should not have felt like a caress.

I looked at him, at the control on his face, at the darkness sitting behind it, at the way he was giving me an instruction that somehow still felt like a request because he would never drag where he wanted willingly given.

“All right,” I said softly.

Something in his expression shifted then. Satisfied. Not smug. Not entitled. Just satisfied in a way that made my stomach dip.

He stepped back first. “I need to attend to some pressing matters in the alpha’s office,” he said ” I will be back soon,” he assured me.

I watched him walk away down the corridor with that same calm stride and realised my heart had become far too aware of him for my own peace.

Then I went back into the room where dresses still lay across chairs and silk still waited and the mirror still stood ready to show me a woman I was beginning, slowly, unwillingly, to recognize.