Ch. I Refuse to Be Your Luna 182 I Refuse to Be Your Luna 182

Chapter 182 The Secret In The Dark

Lady Flourish’s POV

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The moment the lights went out, my wolf took control of my senses, sharpening my hearing until I could pick out every movement inside the house.

My father’s breathing turned uneven behind me, and somewhere beyond the study door, a floorboard creaked under someone’s weight.

“Don’t move,” Garret whispered.

I ignored him. My claws extended as I stepped away from the desk, the darkness no longer mattering now that my wolf could track the faintest shift in scent through it.

The familiar smell of the Steele Residence still hung close, but beneath it sat another trace that made my stomach tighten immediately.

Smoke, faint and acrid. And under that, something bitter I recognized without wanting to.

Poison.

“Father.”

“I smell it too.” His voice had changed entirely, the easy confidence gone out of it, replaced by something tighter, older. “Stay behind me.”

A low growl escaped my throat before I could stop it. “I don’t need you to protect me.”

“This isn’t about pride.” He moved toward the door anyway, and I caught his arm before he reached it.

“Wait.” He looked back at me, and I held his gaze steady. “Someone wants us to leave this room.”

His eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“Because they want us to walk into something.”

My wolf pressed hard against my skin as another sound reached us from the hallway, a soft step, then another, closer this time.

Garret’s whole body shifted into an Alpha’s stance beside me, shoulders widening, eyes bleeding gold in the dark.

“Someone’s inside,” he said.

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Finished

“I know.”

The handle turned slowly. Garret pushed me behind him just as the door swung open, Mira stood in the frame, breathing hard, one hand pressed against her side.

and

“Lady Flourish.”

I stepped forward past my father. “What happened?”

“I heard someone in the west corridor.” Her voice trembled, and my wolf caught something else on her beyond the obvious exhaustion, not blood, but fear, real and sharp.

“Did you see them?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No.”

Garret was already moving past her into the hall. “Where?”

“The west corridor.”

He turned back to me. “Stay here.”

“No.”

“Flourish.”

“I’m coming with you.”

He looked ready to argue the point properly when another sound cut through the house, a crash, somewhere further down the corridor, and whatever objection he’d been building died instantly.

The hallway sat in near total darkness, but my wolf guided me toward the disturbance regardless. Garret reached the corner first and stopped so abruptly I nearly collided with his back.

A window stood open ahead of us, curtain lifting and falling in the night air, and beside it, something had been left deliberately on the floor.

A black envelope, sealed, untouched by whoever had clearly just fled through that same window.

I crouched and reached for it. Garret’s hand closed around my wrist before I could lift it.

“Don’t.”

“It’s sealed.”

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Chapter 182 The Secret In The Dark

“That doesn’t make it safe.”

I let my wolf test the air around it carefully first, searching for any trace of poison the learned to since the flower on my pillow. Nothing. I opened it anyway.

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way

she’d

Inside sat a single photograph. My mother, younger than I’d ever seen her in any picture I owned, standing beside a man I didn’t recognize at all. My breathing stopped somewhere in my chest.

Garret took one look at it and stepped back like it had burned him. “Where did you get that?”

“It was left here. For us to find.” I studied his face rather than the photograph now, watching something old and careful move behind his eyes. “Who is he?”

He didn’t answer right away.

“Father.”

He swallowed hard. “Her brother.”

My fingers tightened around the edges of the photograph. “My uncle?”

“Yes.”

“You told me he was dead.”

“He is.”

“Then why does someone have a photograph of him, hidden away and delivered to us tonight of all nights?”

“I don’t know,” he said, though his eyes had already drifted back toward the open window, unwilling to hold my gaze any longer.

That was when my wolf caught the scent again, the same female trace from before, stronger now, close enough to actually follow. I turned toward the staircase. “Someone’s still here.”

“Where?”

“Upstairs.”

We moved fast after that, and I heard a door slam somewhere above us before we’d even reached the landing.

Garret shifted partway, claws extending as he shoved the first door open. Empty. The second, empty as well. Then my wolf caught the scent directly ahead, sharp and immediate, and I ran

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Chapter 182 The Secret In The Dark

without waiting for him.

Finished

The bedroom door stood open, the balcony doors thrown wide behind it. Whoever had been here had already gone. I rushed out onto the balcony and looked over the railing, finding nothing at first, then catching a last thin trace of scent drifting up from somewhere below.

“She was here,” I said, gripping the railing hard enough to feel it in my palms.

“Who?” Garret asked, beside me now.

“I don’t know.”

My phone rang. Damian.

“Where are you?” I answered before the second ring finished.

“Outside the residence.”

“Come in. Someone broke into the house.”

A brief silence, then, “I’m coming.”

“Damian.” I hesitated only a second. “I found something. A photograph of my mother, with her brother.”

His breathing changed audibly through the line. “Her brother?”

“Yes.”

“You need to show me.”

“I will.” I ended the call, and when I turned, Garret was watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite place.

“What did he say?”

“Nothing important.”

“Flourish.” His voice had gone quiet, careful. “Why are you afraid of that photograph?”

I didn’t answer, because that was when my wolf caught it, faint and nearly gone beneath everything else in the room, but unmistakable all the same. I’d smelled it before. At the hospital. Near the poisoned flower on my pillow. Near the traces found in Damian’s own villa.

My heart began to race. “Father. Who’s been in this house recently?”

“No one.”

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“Think carefully.”

“I already told you, no one.”

I stepped closer, close enough that he couldn’t look away from me easily. “Then why can I smell the same person who was near me the night I received the Widow’s Kiss?”

His expression cracked entirely, something raw and frightened surfacing beneath it, and before either of us could say anything more, Damian stepped into the room.

His eyes found mine instantly, and he crossed the distance between us in three strides, taking my hand and checking my wrists and face before pulling me hard against his chest.

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

His shoulders eased, just slightly. “Good.”

I let my forehead rest against him for one long second, allowing his familiar scent to settle my wolf properly for the first time all night. Then he turned toward my father.

“What happened here?”

Garret opened his mouth to answer, and that was when my phone vibrated in my hand.

An unknown number.

“You found your mother’s diary. Now find the pages she hid from you.”

My heart stopped. A second message followed almost immediately.

“Because the woman who killed Elara is still alive.”

My wolf snarled low in my throat. I looked up at Damian and he took the phone gently from my fingers, reading both messages in silence, his expression hardening by degrees.

Then a third message arrived, and neither of us said a word as we read it together.

“And she’s already inside your family.”