Ch. I Refuse to Be Your Luna 263 I Refuse to Be Your Luna 263

Chapter 263 First Attack

Lady Flourish’s POV

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The council chamber doors blew inward before anyone finished bracing for it.

I felt the shift take me almost before I chose it, bones rearranging, claws pushing through where fingers had been a second earlier, and then there were wolves pouring through the broken doorway, six or seven of them, moving with a coordination ordinary rogues never bothered with.

“Defend the chamber!” Harold’s voice cracked over the noise, already shifted, already meeting the first attacker head on before the man had cleared the threshold.

I lunged at the second wolf through the gap, catching him by the shoulder and driving him sideways into an overturned chair.

He snarled and twisted free faster than I expected, and something on his collar caught the light, a small metal device I didn’t recognize, humming faintly against his fur.

Rhys shouted from near the terminal, half his attention on the screen, half on the fight breaking out around him. “They’re carrying something that’s interfering with the wards! I can’t isolate the breach!”

‘Those devices are drinking blood, my wolf said, sharp with alarm as I caught the coppery undertone beneath the metal. ‘Bound to blood. That’s how they’re cutting through the old protections.’

I didn’t have time to ask my wolf to explain further. Another attacker came at me low, aiming for my legs, and I twisted out of the way and drove my claws across his back hard enough to send him yelping into the wall.

My phone buzzed against my hip in the middle of it, an absurd, mundane sound in the middle of a fight for our lives, and some instinct made me answer it anyway, phone pressed to my ear while I kept my eyes on the room.

“Flourish, it’s Cheryl.” Her voice was thin with panic. “Something’s happening to our systems. Someone’s inside F-Tech’s network right now, and it’s using the same signature as whatever hit Stonehedge’s server two nights ago.”

My stomach dropped straight through the floor. “The same attack. At the same time.”

“I think so.”

I ended the call because there wasn’t room in my head for anything else, and across the chamber I watched Harold slam another attacker to the ground, blood running from a gash

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Chapter 263 First Attack

along his forearm that he didn’t seem to notice yet.

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Two of the elders had pressed themselves against the far wall, Magnus among them, shouting orders that nobody in the middle of the fighting had time to follow.

Guards formed a loose wall in front of them, holding the line while the chamber itself seemed to shudder around us, plaster raining down from a crack spreading across the ceiling.

Elara hadn’t shifted. She stood near the broken doorway with her hands pressed flat against the frame, and for a moment I thought she was frozen with fear until I realized she was watching the attackers with something closer to recognition.

“You know them,” I called across the room, dodging another swipe of claws.

“I know what they’re carrying,” she called back. “Not who’s wearing it.”

That wasn’t an answer, but there wasn’t time to demand a better one. Another wolf lunged at me, and I caught his wrist mid strike and twisted until something cracked, driving him down. hard enough that he didn’t get up again right away.

The terminal screen behind Rhys flickered, the fight briefly forgotten as new text scrolled across it, replacing whatever he’d been trying to pull up. I only caught it because I happened to be facing that direction when it changed.

FIRST ALPHA BLOODLINE – TRANSFER PROTOCOL: INITIATED.

I stared at it even as another wolf came at me from the side, and something cold settled through my chest that had nothing to do with the fighting still going on around us.

“Rhys, what does that mean?”

He didn’t answer right away, too busy slamming his palm against a key to try and kill whatever process was running. “I don’t know. It’s not our system. It’s using our hardware, but the code isn’t anything I recognize.”

Harold shoved the last attacker near him into the wall hard enough to knock him unconscious, chest heaving, and turned toward the sound of my voice in time to see the words still glowing on the screen.

“Transfer protocol,” he repeated, low. “Transfer of what?”

I already knew, even before Elara said it, even before the answer settled into the room like something with weight.

They weren’t here to kill me.

Every attacker who’d come through that door, every device humming against wolf fur, every

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Chapter 263 First Attack

er

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line of code crawling through both Stonehedge’s system and F-Tech’s at the same exact hour, all of it pointed toward one thing. They wanted something out of me.

Something they believed lived in my blood, something they intended to take whether I offered it or not, and every wolf lying broken on the chamber floor had been sent here to make sure I didn’t walk out of this room until they got it.

The last standing attacker backed toward the doorway instead of pressing forward, and for a moment I thought he meant to retreat.

Instead he lifted his head and looked directly at me, eyes catching the light in a way that wasn’t entirely wolf and wasn’t entirely human either.

“She’s confirmed,” he said, to no one in the room, like he was speaking to someone listening from somewhere else entirely.

Then he turned and bolted through the broken doorway before Harold could reach him, and the tremor beneath the floor I’d felt earlier rolled through the chamber one more time, stronger now, closer, like something enormous had just gotten exactly what it came for.

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