Ch. I Refuse to Be Your Luna 240 I Refuse to Be Your Luna 240

Chapter 240 The Abandoned Vehicle

Alpha Harold Virel’s POV

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Rhys’s voice was still ringing in my ear when I told him to seal the eastern gate. “Nobody touches anything until I get there.”

“Already on it,” he said, and the line went dead.

Flourish was already reaching for her coat before I finished putting my phone away.

“You’re not coming.”

“I am.”

“Flourish.”

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“If you leave me here, I’ll just follow in my own car, and then you’ll have two things to worry about instead of one.”

‘She has a point, my wolf said, and I hated that it was right.

“Fine. But you stay behind me the whole time.”

She didn’t answer that, which I took as agreement, though I knew better than to trust it completely.

The drive to the eastern gate took eleven minutes, and neither of us said much.

My wolf kept pacing under my skin, restless in a way it hadn’t been since the attack at the

restaurant.

Something about Marvolo’s name showing up here, at Stonehedge’s own border, didn’t sit right with me. He’d smelled like the tunnels.

He’d known Elara’s name before anyone told him. And now his car was sitting abandoned at our gate like he’d walked away from it, or been taken from it.

Rhys met us at the checkpoint with three warriors standing behind him, all of them keeping a respectful distance from the vehicle itself.

It was a dark sedan, unremarkable, parked at an angle that suggested it had stopped in a hurry rather than been carefully left there.

“How long?” I asked.

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Chapter 240 The Abandoned Vehicle

“Less than an hour, based on the engine heat.”

“And the gate cameras?”

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Rhys shook his head. “No record of him coming through. Not on foot, not in the car. It’s like the vehicle just appeared here.”

I crouched near the driver’s side door, and my wolf immediately caught something underneath the usual smell of leather and gasoline. Faint, but familiar.

“That’s the same scent,” I said. “From the tunnels.”

Flourish had gone quiet beside me, and when I looked up, her face had changed completely. She leaned toward the back window, one hand pressed flat against the glass.

“Damian-” She caught herself, and I realized she’d meant to say someone else’s name before catching it. “Harold. That’s my mother’s scent.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’d know it anywhere.”

I didn’t argue with her. A mother’s scent wasn’t something a daughter mistook, mate bond or

not.

I opened the door myself, careful not to disturb anything, and the smell hit me stronger once the seal broke. Elara. Faint, days old maybe, but unmistakably her.

“She was in this car.”

“Recently?”

“I can’t tell. Could be old, could be from tonight.”

Flourish’s hands were shaking slightly, and I put a hand on her shoulder without really thinking about it.

She didn’t shrug it off, which told me more than anything she could have said out loud.

Magnus called out from the other side of the vehicle before either of us could say more. “Harold. Come look at this.”

I left Flourish by the door and walked around to where Magnus was crouched at the back seat, gloves already on, examining a dark stain that had soaked into the fabric.

“Blood,” he said. “Not much. Enough to matter, not enough to mean the worst.”

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Chapter 240 The Abandoned Vehicle

“Whose?”

“Won’t know until we test it, but it’s fresh. A day, maybe less.”

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My stomach turned at that. If it was Elara’s, that put a timeline on things we hadn’t had before. If it was Marvolo’s, it meant something else entirely, something closer to him being a victim rather than a conspirator.

Magnus reached beneath the floor mat next and pulled out a small black device, cracked down the middle like someone had stepped on it or thrown it against the seat.

“A tracker,” he said. “Someone destroyed this on purpose.”

I took it from him and turned it over. The casing was standard, nothing fancy, the kind you could buy from half a dozen suppliers if you knew where to look. “Rhys, can you pull anything

off this?”

“I can try. It’s damaged pretty badly.”

“Try anyway.”

Flourish had come around the car by then, arms crossed tight against her chest. “If he was tracking someone, that means he wasn’t working with whoever took my mother.”

“Or he was tracking her for them,” I said. “We don’t know which yet.”

“You still don’t trust him.”

“I don’t trust anyone who smells like the people who took your mother, no.”

She didn’t like that answer, I could see it in the set of her jaw, but she didn’t push back either.

My wolf wanted to believe her, wanted to give Marvolo the benefit of every doubt because she seemed to want that so badly. But wanting something and knowing it were two different animals entirely.

“Increase the eastern patrols,” I told Magnus. “Double them if you can spare the wolves.”

“Already thin from last night.”

“Then pull from the western wall. This matters more right now.”

He nodded and moved off to make the calls, and I was left standing there with Flourish and the abandoned car and the smell of her mother still clinging to the back seat like a question none of us could answer.

My phone rang before I could say anything else to her. Garret.

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“Alpha Garret.”

“Harold.” His voice sounded different than usual, tired in a way I hadn’t heard from him before. “I spoke to Selene.”

“And?”

“She admitted it.” He paused, and I heard him exhale slowly on the other end. “She’s been targeting Flourish, yes, but not entirely on her own.”

I looked over at Flourish, who had gone very still, watching my face like she could read the rest of the conversation just from that.

“What do you mean, not on her own?”

Garret’s voice dropped lower. “She said someone’s been telling her what to do for months. Feeding her information, pushing her toward it. She won’t say who yet.”

My wolf went rigid inside me.

“Someone’s been directing her the whole time.”

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