Ch. I Refuse to Be Your Luna 135 I Refuse to Be Your Luna 135

Chapter 135 A Scent That Doesn’t Belong

Alpha Damian’s POV

Finished

She called me old. Not directly though – Flourish would never say something so bluntly cruel, not when she’d spent the better part of the last ten minutes tripping over her own words trying to avoid exactly that.

But the accusation had landed anyway, however clumsily she’d tried to walk it back, and I found myself entirely too amused by it to actually be offended.

Thirty-three. Barely into what most wolves considered their prime years, decades away from anything resembling old by pack standards.

She’d know that herself soon enough, once whatever remained of her human hesitation finally wore away completely.

I leaned against her doorframe, arms crossed, watching the empty hallway she’d disappeared down.

My wolf paced lazily behind my ribs, entirely too pleased with how the evening had unfolded – Julian’s teasing, Lucinda’s near-discovery smoothed over, the quiet, the feel of Flourish’s hand in mine during the drive home.

It had been a good night, the kind we hadn’t allowed ourselves nearly enough of since the poisoning.

She hadn’t invited me inside. I noted it, filed it away without resentment. She’d handed me nearly everything else already. Her trust, her body, the fragile, wary parts of herself she usually kept locked behind careful composure.

The door code could wait until she was ready to offer it on her own terms.

I wanted the registration finalized. If I was being honest with myself, I’d wanted it the moment Magnus had first raised an eyebrow at the banquet and I hadn’t bothered denying a single word of his assumption.

But Flourish was right to be cautious. Karl was still out there, still funding Ashdown, still circling closer with every passing day, and a formal mate registration would only paint an even larger target across both our backs before we’d finished dismantling whatever he was building.

Patience had never come naturally to me. My wolf certainly didn’t understand the concept, snapping irritably at the idea of waiting even one more week for something that already felt like ours by every measure that mattered.

He wanted her scent layered permanently into mine, wanted the world to know exactly whose

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11:43 Thu, Oct 1

Chapter 135 A Scent That Doesn’t Belong

she was without needing a single word of explanation.

But I could wait. For her, I’d learned to.

Finished

I inhaled without meaning to, some old habit of cataloging my surroundings even in a place as familiar and safe as her apartment building.

Warm laundry detergent drifting from a neighboring unit. Old carpet, faintly dusty. The particular floral notes of whatever candle she liked to burn in the evenings, drifting faintly from beneath her door.

And underneath it, so faint I nearly dismissed it as imagination, something colder.

Metallic. Sharp. Achingly familiar.

My entire body went still.

It was the same scent that had lingered outside F-Tech’s parking structure. The same wrongness that had no business existing anywhere near a place Flourish considered safe.

I pushed off the doorframe, every instinct sharpening into focus, and inhaled again, slower this time, tracking the thread of it toward its source.

It wasn’t coming from inside her apartment.

It was coming from the stairwell at the end of the hall, faint, recent, no more than an hour old, the kind of trace a careful intruder left behind when they thought no one capable of catching it would ever pass this way.

Someone had been here. Recently. Watching, waiting, or simply confirming exactly which door belonged to her.

“Flourish.” My voice came out rougher than I intended, already moving toward the stairwell before I’d fully decided to. “Don’t come out yet. Stay inside.”

I didn’t wait to see if she’d listened. My wolf had already taken over the greater part of my focus, narrowing the hallway down to a single, singular purpose. Find the source, corner it, and make absolutely certain nothing wearing that scent ever came within a hundred feet of her door again.

Every light in the corridor suddenly felt too dim, every closed door a place something could be hiding behind.

The stairwell door groaned faintly under my palm as I eased it open, the metallic thread of scent growing stronger with every step down.

Whoever had been here hadn’t left long ago.

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11:43 Thu, Oct 1

Chapter 135 A Scent That Doesn’t Belong

22

Finished

And judging by how carefully they’d avoided the building’s main entrance, they hadn’t wanted to be seen arriving in the first place.

I reached the bottom landing and paused, letting the scent settle fully into memory the way I’d trained myself to catalog every threat that ever came near something I claimed as mine.

It wasn’t Ashdown’s scent. It wasn’t anything I’d encountered directly yet, which meant Karl was either recruiting new hands or growing bold enough to start scouting targets himself.

Either possibility set my teeth on edge. Six years of running Stonehedge had taught me to trust that particular cold, crawling instinct whenever it surfaced, and it was screaming at me now louder than it had in a long while.

I pulled out my phone and dialed Bram without hesitation, my voice dropping into the flat, clipped tone I reserved for pack business rather than anything resembling patience.

“I need eyes on Flourish’s building. Tonight. Whoever was watching her tonight already knows exactly where she lives, and I intend to make sure they regret ever finding out.”

Bram’s voice came back low and alert, already moving. “On it. Should I pull her security detail in closer?”

“Do it quietly,” I said, glancing back up the stairwell toward the floor where she was still, I hoped, standing safely behind a locked door. “She doesn’t need to spend tonight looking over her shoulder in her own home. Let me handle the worrying for both of us.”

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11:43 Thu, Oct 1

1 Retuse To Be Your Luna