Ch. I Refuse to Be Your Luna 154 I Refuse to Be Your Luna 154

Chapter 154 Its Your Call

Lady Flourish’s POV

20

Finished

“I already told your Mr. Rowe it wasn’t a case of us poaching,” Poppy said smoothly, already turning to go. “The choice was entirely theirs. Give Rhys a heads-up, would you? I’d rather he heard it from you than came storming into my office about it.”

She walked off before I could respond, her satisfaction trailing after her like a scent she wanted me to catch.

I stood there a moment, something cold settling low in my stomach. Stonehedge Studios choosing Poppy’s team over mine wasn’t really the problem, plenty of clients moved between practice groups inside F-Tech without it meaning anything.

The problem was what it meant for Ethan’s case, and for the poster case Lila was already halfway into. If Poppy’s team now held the Stonehedge Studios account, both of those cases had just become considerably harder to touch without setting off a very public conflict of interest, right in the middle of the largest merger F-Tech had ever attempted.

I knocked on Rhys’s door before I’d fully decided what I wanted to say.

“Come in.” He glanced up from his desk, already reading something in my face before I’d said a word. “You look troubled.”

“I ran into Poppy. Stonehedge Studios signed with her team.”

He didn’t look surprised, which told me everything I needed to know. “I’m aware. You weren’t planning to take them on yourself, and Shawn’s people turned it down when I floated it their way. So I let it go. If Poppy wants the account, that’s hers to manage.”

He made it sound effortless, the way he made most difficult decisions sound, but I knew better. Stonehedge Studios sat under the same umbrella as Stonehedge Holdings, the client we were currently in the middle of merging half our future revenue projections around.

Letting that particular account walk to another practice group wasn’t a small thing, even inside our own walls. He’d done it for me, quietly, without ever expecting thanks for it.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You shouldn’t have had to give that up on my account.”

“I thought something serious had happened,” he said, waving it off with the same easy dismissal he used whenever he didn’t want a conversation to linger somewhere uncomfortable. “That’s all this was? You two were never on good terms to begin with. Nothing to apologize for.”

“Rhys.” I made myself sit down properly instead of hovering in his doorway. “Remember Lila’s infringement case? The defendant is signed to Stonehedge Studios.”

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11:50 Thu, Oct 1

Chapter 154 Its Your Call

finished

That got a longer pause than I expected. “I know. Lila hasn’t formally signed anything with the client yet, just early conversations.”

“And if I told you I’ve got a second client who wants to go after Stonehedge Studios too?”

His eyes narrowed, sharp and assessing in the particular way that made him formidable in every negotiation I’d ever watched him run. “Is this you setting me up to send Poppy after your own account, Flourish? Enough circling it. Why does this case matter so much to you personally?”

I hadn’t planned to say it outright, but something about his directness made dodging feel pointless. “Both cases involve the same artist Stonehedge Studios is building their whole next quarter around. Phina Jacobs.” I held his gaze. “She’s also the reason my family’s arrangement with Harold fell apart, years ago. It never went further than that, but everyone in Stonehedge still remembers the shape of it, and she made sure it ended the way it did.”

Rhys went very still. My wolf caught the faint shift in his scent, surprise, quickly folding into understanding. “That explains considerably more than I expected it to.” He exhaled, leaning back in his chair. “But F-Tech can’t officially touch this, Flourish. Not with Stonehedge Holdings mid-merger. One whiff of us going after their subsidiary and the whole deal collapses under a conflict-of-interest challenge before it ever reaches signature.”

“I know,” I admitted, already braced for it.

“But,” he added, and I caught the small pause he left there, “F-Tech isn’t the only firm in this city. I’ve got a friend at Zephyr Legal who’d take it in a heartbeat, with proper lead counsel on their side.

If you want to weigh in unofficially, on your own time, that’s entirely your call. We’re not in the business of policing your personal life.”

Relief hit me harder than I expected. “Thank you, Rhys. Genuinely.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Thank me if it actually works.” He was already turning back to his monitor, though something in his expression lingered a beat longer than the conversation strictly required — a small, assessing look I couldn’t quite place.

–

Back at my desk, I fired off a message to Ethan, and we locked in a new meeting for seven that evening at Zephyr Legal.

I was still typing when I felt Rhys, lingering in his own doorway across the floor, watching me with an expression that had nothing to do with client conflicts or merger timelines at all. The particular, quiet focus of someone doing arithmetic he hadn’t quite finished yet: the no- overtime clause that had appeared out of nowhere the same week Damian joined this deal personally.

11:50 Thu, Oct 1

Chapter 154 Its Your Call

Finished

The furniture shopping I’d tried to wave off as nothing. A photograph, apparently, that half the pack had already seen by now, whether I’d meant for them to or not.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.

My stomach dropped anyway, because I recognized that look. It was the exact look my own father wore right before he asked a question he already suspected the answer to.

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