Ch. I Refuse to Be Your Luna 262 I Refuse to Be Your Luna 262

Chapter 262 The Message

Alpha Harold’s POV

I didn’t wait for anyone to give me permission to move.

M

Ne

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“Seal the eastern wing. Nobody in, nobody out until I say otherwise.” My voice carried through the radio and through the records room at the same time, and the two guards nearest the door scattered to obey before I’d even finished the sentence.

My wolf pressed hard against my skin, reacting to Elara the second I’d walked into that room, to a scent I’d been told for years belonged to a dead woman. It should have been impossible.

Wolves didn’t come back from the kind of death that got recorded in pack archives with a date, a signature, and a formal mourning period observed by half the estate.

But there she stood, breathing, talking, arguing with me like she had every right to be in this building, and my instincts didn’t know what to do with the contradiction, so I shoved it down and focused on the part of this I actually understood, which was almost nothing.

“You said they found her,” I said. “Found her how? She’s lived on this estate her entire life. If someone wanted her, they’ve had years.”

“They never stopped looking,” Elara said again, like the sentence was the only thing she trusted herself to repeat without breaking apart. “Not for the estate. For the bloodline. It doesn’t disappear just because someone hides the person carrying it.”

“That’s not an answer, Elara.”

“It’s the only one I have time to give you right now.”

Rhys had already abandoned the server terminal for a moment, pulling old files from a locked cabinet against the wall, checking dates against whatever kept flashing across his screen.

I left him to it and crossed to the shelving unit at the far end of the room, because something in the way Elara’s eyes kept flicking toward it told me she’d rather I look anywhere else.

I found the photograph tucked behind a row of ledgers nobody had touched in years, the dust on top of them thick enough to leave a print.

Garret, younger than I’d ever seen him, his arm around Elara’s shoulders, and between the two of them a small girl who could only have been Flourish, maybe five years old, laughing at something happening just outside the frame.

My chest went tight looking at it, and not because of anything sentimental in the image itself. It

was what the

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Chapter 262 The Message

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Garret had known. He’d stood there with his wife and his daughter, fully aware of what she carried inside her, and in all the years I’d worked beside him, sat across from him at council meetings, trusted his judgment on matters that touched every wolf under Stonehedge’s protection, he had never said a single word about any of it.

“Your family knew far more than they ever admitted to this pack,” I said, holding the photo up where she could see it clearly.

Elara didn’t deny it. She only looked exhausted, the kind of tired that came from carrying something too heavy for too many years.

“Garret made choices I didn’t always agree with,” she said quietly. “But he made them believing they’d keep her alive. That has to count for something, even now.”

‘Whoever else knew this,’ my wolf said, low and dangerous under my ribs, ‘they let her walk around this estate for years without the protection she should have had from the day she was born.’

I wanted to press further. I wanted to march straight to Garret’s quarters and drag an explanation out of him that actually made sense, something that would let me understand how a man I’d trusted with pack business for over a decade had sat on a secret this large without so much as a warning.

“How many other people know?” I asked instead. “Magnus? The elders?”

“I don’t know who Garret told after I disappeared,” Elara admitted. “I wasn’t here for any of it.”

“Convenient.”

“It wasn’t convenient for me at all.”

Something in her voice made me pause, but before I could push further, the floor beneath us answered the question neither of us had time left to argue about,

A low vibration rolled up through the boards, subtle at first, the kind of tremor a human might mistake for a truck passing on the road outside, but I wasn’t human, and neither was anyone else in that room. My wolf recognized it immediately for what it was.

Rhys froze at the terminal, one hand still on the keyboard. “Alpha. The eastern wards just registered movement. Underground.”

“Where exactly?”

“Beneath the council chamber. Moving toward us. Fast.”

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Chapter 262 The Message

no business being able to access, I saw real fear cross her face.

Not the careful, managed fear of someone navigating a difficult conversation with her estranged daughter’s mate standing over her.

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Something closer to what I imagined she must have felt on whatever night she’d vanished all those years ago.

“They’re already inside Stonehedge,” she said.

My wolf surged forward before I’d made the conscious decision to let it. I dropped the photograph on the desk, already reaching for the radio again, already calculating how many warriors I could pull from the perimeter without leaving the outer walls exposed.

“Rhys, get eyes on that tunnel entrance. Now.”

“Working on it.”

“Elara.” I turned back to her, and whatever softness had crept into my voice during the last several minutes was gone. “You’re not leaving this room until I understand exactly what we’re walking into.”

She met my eyes, and for a moment I thought she might actually refuse.

“Then you’d better start walking fast,” she said, “because whatever’s coming isn’t going to wait for either of us to be ready.”

Somewhere beneath the floor, the tremor grew stronger, and I felt every instinct in my body scream that we were already out of time.

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12:36 Thu, Oct 1

I Refuse To Be Your Luna