Ch. I Refuse to Be Your Luna 150 I Refuse to Be Your Luna 150

Chapter 150 Feeling Down

Lady Flourish’s POV

300

Finished

I stared at him, his fingers still wrapped loosely around my wrist, that glassy, feverish look gone from his eyes like it had never existed at all.

“You ‘lied’ to me?”

“A little,” he admitted, entirely unrepentant, though he had the decency to look faintly sheepish about it. “The congee smelled too good to risk you deciding I didn’t need it after all.”

I should have been annoyed. My wolf certainly was, letting out a low, unimpressed huff somewhere beneath my ribs. But there was something in the way he was watching me carefully, almost tentatively, like he wasn’t entirely sure I wouldn’t just take the bowl and walk straight back out –

that softened whatever irritation I’d been building toward.

“Fine,” I said, setting the bowl in my lap instead of handing it over. “Since you’re apparently too weak to feed yourself either way, I suppose I’ll finish the job.”

“I have no strength at all,” he agreed instantly, tipping his head back against the headboard with entirely too much enthusiasm for a man claiming exhaustion.

I fed him one spoonful at a time, blowing on each before I offered it, and he took every one without complaint, watching me the entire time with an attention that made my skin feel strangely warm.

My wolf, at least, had stopped grumbling. She liked this, the closeness, the quiet, the particular kind of care that had nothing to do with pack politics or contracts or any of the careful architecture I usually built my life around.

“Did work go alright today?” he asked, once the bowl was half empty.

“It was fine,” I said, and even to my own ears the words came out flatter than I meant them to.

He went quiet for a moment, studying me in that unhurried, unreadable way of his. “Then why do you look like this?”

I blinked, caught off guard. “Like what?”

“Upset.” He said it simply, without pushing, though something in his gaze made it clear he wasn’t going to let the question drop.

I hadn’t realized it showed. I looked down at the bowl instead of at him. “Today’s my grandmother’s mourning day. First of the fourteen. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bring the mood

with me.”

11:50 Thu, Oct 1

Chapter 150 Feeling Down

21

Finistied

Something shifted across his face, quick and genuine. “I got the days confused. I thought it was tomorrow. I’m sorry, Flourish.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” I said, surprised he’d bothered at all. “It’s not your fault.”

It had been over a month now since Grandmother Edda passed, and most days I managed just fine. It was only on days like this, the ceremonial ones, the ones that demanded I sit with it properly instead of simply moving forward that the grief caught up all at once, sharp and unexpected.

That, and the fact that whoever had actually let her condition go untreated for so long, whoever among the pack elders had decided her care wasn’t worth the expense, still hadn’t answered for any of it. My wolf still hadn’t forgiven that particular silence, even if I’d learned to carry it quietly.

Damian set the empty bowl aside and held out one hand. “Come here.”

I hesitated for exactly one heartbeat before my body moved toward him anyway, some instinct older than my own good sense overriding whatever composure I’d been holding onto all day.

He pulled me in against his chest, one arm settled firm around my waist, the other hand moving slow and steady through my hair. “Don’t be sad,” he murmured, the words rougher than his usual easy confidence. “I’ve got you.”

My throat tightened without warning. Grandmother used to do exactly this, the same slow, patient stroke through my hair whenever the world got to be too much, back when I was small enough to still believe she’d always be there to do it.

“I’m okay,” I managed, though my voice cracked halfway through the sentence, betraying every word of it. “I just miss her. A little.”

“I know,” he said quietly, and something in the low, steady rumble beneath his voice, that particular resonance only an Alpha’s chest produced settled over me like a weight I hadn’t realized I needed. “From now on, everything’s on me. You don’t carry this alone anymore.”

I let myself lean into him a moment longer than was probably wise, breathing in the warm, familiar scent of him, some fractured part of me finally quieting for the first time all day.

That was when my wolf went suddenly, sharply still.

A scent, faint and unfamiliar, threading in from somewhere just past the bedroom window, not Nerissa’s, not Corin’s, not anyone who belonged on this property. Something cold and deliberate, gone as quickly as it had come, like whoever it belonged to had realized, in that exact instant, that a wolf inside this house had finally caught the wind of them.

I went rigid against Damian’s chest.

11:50 Thu, Oct 1

Chapter 150 Feeling Down

21

Finished

“What is it?” he asked immediately, every trace of softness gone from his voice, replaced by something low and lethal that I hadn’t heard from him before.

“Someone’s outside,” I whispered. “Someone who isn’t supposed to be here.”

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