Ch. I Refuse to Be Your Luna 165 I Refuse to Be Your Luna 165

Chapter 165 Three Minutes

Lady Flourish’s POV

I’d just finished washing up when my phone rang from an unknown number.

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Finished

Half asleep already, I answered on instinct, thinking it might be a client calling late about the merger. The voice on the other end erased that thought immediately, my whole body going cold and alert at once.

“It’s me. Come downstairs. If you don’t, I’m coming up.”

Harold. There was no room in his tone for negotiation, the particular flat certainty of someone who’d already decided how tonight was going to go regardless of what I actually wanted from it.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” I kept my voice low and sharp, though my pulse had already picked up considerably, my wolf coming alert somewhere beneath my ribs at the sound

of him.

“When you pushed Phina’s scandal onto the trending list, did you check the clock then?”

So that was it. He’d come for her, exactly the way I should have expected the second his name lit up my screen instead of Damian’s.

“You have three minutes,” he said, “before I decide your neighbors deserve a reason to call security.”

My jaw tightened. “Fine. Last time, Harold. I mean it.”

If he pulled this stunt again, I wasn’t going to bother negotiating with him at all. I’d let the authorities handle whatever came next, pack standing or not.

I threw a cardigan over my nightgown, not bothering to fix the loose knot my hair had settled into, and took the stairs down rather than wait for the elevator, some instinct insisting speed mattered more than composure tonight.

My wolf paced the whole way down, restless, unconvinced this was going to end as simply as three minutes and a slammed door.

He was already leaning against his car when I reached the entrance, and something in the way his gaze moved slowly over me made my skin crawl before he’d said a single word.

My wolf bristled hard, sharp and immediate, catching the particular shift in his scent that had nothing to do with anger at all, something warmer and considerably less welcome threaded underneath it.

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Chapter 165 Three Minutes

I pulled the cardigan tighter across my chest, disgust flickering plainly across my face. “If you have something to say, say it. I’m not standing out here all night.”

Whatever fog had briefly clouded his expression cleared, replaced by something colder and more deliberate. “Did you buy that trending topic?”

“Excuse me?”

“So jealous you had to smear her.” He took a step closer, close enough that I had to work not to retreat from it on pure reflex, my wolf snapping her attention fully onto the narrowing distance between us. “If you were that jealous, Flourish, you shouldn’t have broken things off in the first place. You’d still be standing exactly where she is now, if you’d wanted it.”

I rolled my eyes, refusing to let the accusation land anywhere near where he clearly wanted it to settle. “Stop rewriting history to suit tonight’s mood, Harold. You know exactly how that engagement actually ended.”

My tone sharpened further, every word deliberate and precise, the same careful edge I used in a boardroom when I wanted a point to actually stick. “I didn’t buy that trend. I don’t have the reach to keep a story pinned to the top of anything for five hours straight, let alone overnight without half the industry noticing something was staged.” A short, humorless laugh escaped me. “And even if I somehow did, don’t stand there pretending you don’t have the exact power to make it disappear the moment you actually wanted it gone. We both know that’s true.”

Something tightened visibly across his chest at that, his jaw working through whatever answer he’d already half prepared. He already suspected the truth, I realized, watching him carefully in the dim garage light.

He’d simply wanted to hear it confirmed from my own mouth, and beneath that suspicion sat something far more pathetic, some small, ridiculous hope flickering behind his eyes that if I had genuinely gone after Phina out of jealousy, it might mean some part of me still cared enough to bother.

“I don’t,” I said quietly, answering the question he hadn’t actually asked out loud. “Whatever this is tonight, Harold, it isn’t jealousy. I’ve told you that before, more than once, and I meant it every single time.”

His jaw worked, some old, familiar frustration surfacing beneath the anger, raw enough that for a moment he looked less like an Alpha’s heir and more like the boy I’d known before either of us understood what our families expected us to become.

In the month since our arrangement fell apart, I’d apparently spent every subsequent encounter quietly dismantling whatever pride he still had left, and tonight was clearly no exception to that pattern.

“Then why,” he said, voice dropping into something rawer than I’d heard from him in years, stripped of all its usual careful polish, “does it feel like you’d rather see me fail than see me

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Chapter 165 Three Minutes

happy? I’ve tried, Flourish. I’ve tried to be civil about all of this.”

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I opened my mouth to answer, some honest response finally forming after a month of dodging this exact conversation, and that was when headlights swept hard across the parking structure entrance, fast and deliberate, a car pulling in at a speed that had nothing casual about it at all.

Damian’s car.

He was out of it before it had fully stopped rolling, and even from this distance I felt the shift in the air around him, something dark and coiled and utterly controlled radiating off him in waves my wolf recognized instantly as pure, unrestrained warning.

Every light in the garage seemed to dim by comparison to the sheer weight of him crossing that concrete floor.

Harold turned too, his own posture straightening on pure instinct, some old, wary reflex rising in him at the sight of his cousin closing the distance between us with a speed that made the entire structure feel considerably smaller than it had a moment ago.

“Harold.” Damian’s voice came out low, deceptively even, every syllable carrying the particular weight of an Alpha who’d stopped pretending patience the second he’d read that tracking alert on his phone. “Step away from her. Now.”

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