Ch. I Refuse to Be Your Luna 168 I Refuse to Be Your Luna 168

Finished

Chapter 168 A Question

Lady Flourish’s POV

I hadn’t truly slept. I’d floated in and out of shallow, restless dreams all night, and by morning not a single image had stayed with me, just the dull residue of a mind that never fully settled.

Wren’s name flashed across my screen before I’d even managed coffee.

“Flourish, did I wake you?”

“No, I’m up. What’s wrong?”

“I know you usually sleep in on weekends, but there’s something I forgot to mention.” Guilt threaded through her voice already. “That night at the lounge, after we split up, Elijah picked me up. I told him about Ethan’s situation, hoping he might have a suggestion. I didn’t expect him to actually call your boyfriend about it.”

“My boyfriend?” The word landed strange in my mouth, still unfamiliar no matter how many times other people used it around me lately.

“I checked the trending list yesterday,” she went on, guilt thickening. “That whole Phina scandal. I’m fairly certain Alpha Damian pushed it up himself.”

My heart jolted, hard and sudden. So it really was him. He’d done that. For me.

“Does Damian even know Ethan?” I asked carefully, though I already suspected the shape of the

answer.

Wren laughed, short and disbelieving. “If he knew him personally, would Ethan have needed me to go chasing a lawyer in the first place? Flourish, he’s backing you. This is him settling a score on your behalf.”

My thoughts stalled entirely.

Had he already done that much for me. Quietly, without asking, without expecting credit for it, the same way he’d quietly assigned Fenwick to track my location three days after a stranger’s scent crossed his own property line.

Those messages from last night surfaced again, unbidden. ‘It’ll be ours.’ ‘Sorry, I apologize if I upset you.’

If this were simply convenience between two people using each other for exactly as long as it suited them both, I could hold that at a comfortable distance. But if it was something considerably more real than that, something with actual weight behind it, I wasn’t sure I had it in me to return it in kind. Not after everything the last collapse had cost me to survive.

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Chapter 168 A Question

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“Flourish? Still there?”

I snapped back. “Yeah. Something just came to me. I’ll call you later.”

I set the phone down and stepped out onto the balcony, letting the cool morning air do what it could to steady my thoughts, my wolf pacing low and uncertain beneath my skin. Then, before I could talk myself out of it, I dialed him.

Two rings. “Yeah?”

His voice came out low, still rough with sleep he clearly hadn’t gotten much of either.

“I fell asleep before I saw your messages,” I said, guilt creeping into my own voice now. “Sorry for the silence.”

“Figured as much.” A pause, easy, unhurried. “You up now?”

“About yesterday,” I started, unsure exactly what I meant to say next.

He cut in smoothly, no hesitation in it at all. “Flourish, I’m not planning to live like a monk once we’re actually married. We’ll share a bed. I’m agreeing to this arrangement partly for Alpha Magnus, given everything sitting unresolved between Ragnar’s branch and mine. You want the leverage this gives your father. Fine. But separate rooms isn’t happening. Understood?”

“Understood,” I said, and something in my chest loosened at exactly the wrong moment, relief and disappointment tangled together in a knot I didn’t have the energy to untangle properly.

So that was the shape of it. A political arrangement, dressed up in warmth that had simply felt more personal than it actually was. He needed the marriage to steady his own claim against Harold’s, the same way my father needed it to steady Steele Holdings. Nothing romantic underneath any of it. I’d let myself imagine too much, apparently, reading tenderness into what had only ever been strategy wearing gentler language.

The question I’d almost asked, whether he actually liked me, died somewhere in my throat before it could embarrass either of us.

“Good,” he said. “Come test the bed with me next week, then?”

“No,” I said quickly. “You can handle that on your own.”

I absolutely could not say those particular words out loud, not after everything I’d just talked myself into believing about the shape of what this actually was between us.

“Alright,” he said, and something in his tone sounded faintly, genuinely disappointed, though I told myself I’d imagined it.

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Chapter 168 A Question

“I should get going,” I said.

Finished

“Wait, Damian.” I remembered, suddenly, the real reason I’d called in the first place, the thing that had been sitting heavy in my chest since the night at his villa. “There’s something I should have told you three days ago. Someone was in my apartment. Left something on my pillow, deliberately, so I’d know they’d been there.”

The line went completely silent for a beat too long.

“Say that again,” he said, and every trace of easy warmth had vanished entirely from his voice, replaced by something low and lethal enough that my wolf sat up straight at the sound of it.

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