THE ALPHA’S DEADLY LUNA

Chapter 2: Questions With Teeth

Aurelia POV

If Kade knew everything, I'd already be dead. That thought kept me awake long after the wedding torches burned to nothing, lying on unfamiliar sheets, staring at a ceiling carved with wolf sigils, running through every version of the truth he might already suspect.

He knew something. Not everything, or I'd already be dead, or worse, paraded in front of both packs as proof my father had tried to smuggle a weapon into his enemy's bed.

A knock came just past midnight. Not Della's knock.

Outside, the corridor torches guttered in a draft I couldn't feel, and somewhere far below us a dog, or a wolf pretending to be one, gave a single low bark before falling silent again. I lay very still and listened to my own pulse, willing it to slow before whatever was coming through that door arrived.

"Open it," Kade's voice said through the door, "or I will."

I opened it.

He filled the doorway, still in his ceremonial black, sleeves shoved to his forearms like he'd been pacing somewhere and lost patience with formality.

"We're finishing our conversation," he said.

"It's the middle of the night."

"It is." He didn't move. "And you're not asleep. I can hear your heart from here, little wife. It isn't the rhythm of a woman who was resting."

I made myself flinch, small and convincing, and this time it cost me almost nothing to sell it. "You're frightening me."

"Good." He stepped past me into the room without invitation, and I let myself drift backward, arms folded, the way a cold, scared girl would. "Fear is honest. I'd rather have your fear than your performance."

"I don't know what you think I'm performing."

"Neither do I. Yet." He turned to face me fully, and for a moment neither of us spoke, just the low crackle of the fireplace and the too-loud sound of my own pulse. "Your father's man used the words close eye and full moon in the same sentence, about you, on your wedding day. That is not a coincidence I intend to ignore. Tell me about the full moon, Aurelia."

"My mother was sick during her pregnancy," I said, letting the tremor into my hands as I built the lie. "There were complications. The healers said my wolf might be incomplete. Weak. That's the shame my father never told anyone."

Kade studied me for a long moment, that gold gaze moving over my face like he was hunting for a seam.

"That's almost believable," he said finally.

"It's true."

"Mm." He crossed the room slower than a man his size should be able to move, and stopped close enough that I had to tip my chin to hold his eyes. Close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him, could smell leather and woodsmoke and something underneath that made my pulse do something I hadn't trained it to do.

"You know what gives you away?" he said, quieter now. "You don't smell like fear when I'm close to you. You smell like it when I ask questions. A woman who's actually afraid of her husband doesn't calm down when he stands over her."

I hated that he was right. I hated it more that some traitorous part of me had stopped fighting it, that eleven years of iron discipline had never once accounted for the specific problem of a man whose nearness felt safer than it should.

"Maybe I'm not afraid of you," I said, before I could stop myself. "Maybe I've just accepted there's nothing I can do about any of this."

Something shifted in his face, surprise, maybe, at the honesty. His hand came up, slow enough that I could have stepped back, and didn't, and traced the line of my jaw with a gentleness that didn't match anything else about him. His gaze dropped to my mouth and held there, and the air between us went thick and dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with the interrogation at all.

For a man everyone in three territories called ruthless, his hands were absurdly careful with me, as if some part of him had already decided I was something worth not breaking, even while the rest of him refused to trust me an inch.

"You should hate me," he said, almost to himself. "Everyone else in your position would."

"Should I?"

"I destroyed your father's pack. I forced this marriage on you." His thumb brushed my lower lip, barely, testing. "And I still find myself wanting to know if your mouth is as soft as it looks instead of asking the questions I came here to ask."

For one unguarded second I forgot to perform anything at all. I wasn't a weapon wearing a bride's face. I was only a woman standing too close to a man who frightened her in a way she hadn't accounted for, and wanting, despite everything, to close the last inch between them.

He leaned in, and I let him.

Then a fist hit the door, hard, three times.

Kade jerked back like he'd been burned, jaw tight, predator alertness slamming down over whatever had almost happened between us. "What."

The door opened without waiting for permission. One of his guards, blood on his knuckles, stood breathing hard.

"Alpha. We caught someone on the east wall. Climbing toward the new Luna's window." His eyes flicked to me, uncertain. "He says he was sent by her father. Says he has to speak with her before moonrise tomorrow. Says if he doesn't, she's going to kill someone in this house."

The room went very still.

Kade turned to look at me, and this time there was no softness left in his expression at all, only a raw, dangerous focus that made my stomach drop through the floor. Whatever had almost happened between us a minute ago felt like it belonged to a different night entirely.

"Kill someone," he repeated softly. "In my house."

"I don't know what he's talking about," I said, and for the first time all night, that was almost entirely a lie.