Ch. I Refuse to Be Your Luna 268 I Refuse to Be Your Luna 268

Chapter 268 Blood Claim

Elara’s POV

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Flourish’s refusal still hung in the air when Harold turned on me, and I understood immediately that whatever grace period I’d been given by simply reappearing had run out.

“You’ve had years to explain this,” he said. “You’ll explain it now.”

I looked at my daughter first, not him. She stood with her arms crossed, blood still drying along one sleeve from the fight upstairs, watching me with an expression I hadn’t seen on her since she was small enough to ask why I always checked the windows twice before bed.

“Sit down,” I told her. “Both of you. This isn’t short.”

Neither of them sat. I didn’t push it.

“The First Alpha’s blood passed to me before it ever reached her,” I said. “My mother carried it, and her mother before that, back further than anyone kept proper records for. I was maybe twenty when the first people came looking. Not attackers, not at first. Just questions. Someone wanting to confirm a rumor.”

“What rumor?” Harold asked.

“That the bloodline hadn’t died out the way everyone assumed.”

Voss stood off to the side of the chamber, silent, and I made myself ignore him. I hadn’t decided yet whether his presence made this easier or harder.

“Within a year, the questions turned into something else,” I went on. “Factions inside the old packs, groups that had splintered off generations earlier, started actively hunting for confirmation. Not to protect me. To use me. One side wanted to put me forward as a figurehead to unite territories that hadn’t spoken to each other in decades. Another wanted me removed before the first side got the chance.”

“So you ran,” Flourish said. Not a question. Flat, like she was testing the shape of the words in her own mouth.

“I ran for years before I met your father,” I said. “By the time Flourish was born, I thought I’d finally outpaced it. I was wrong. They found me again when she was small, and that was when I understood staying alive and staying visible couldn’t both be true anymore.”

“So you staged your death.”

“I staged my death,” I confirmed, and the sentence still tasted like ash even after all this time saying it in my head, never out loud, never to her. “It was the only way to make them stop

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12:38 Thu, Oct 1

Chapter 268 Blood Claim

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Finished

looking at this family. If I was dead, the bloodline died with me, as far as anyone hunting for it could prove.”

“Except it didn’t die,” Flourish said. “It went to me.”

“It went to you,” I said. “And I couldn’t tell you, because the moment anyone confirmed a living heir existed, the hunting would start over, worse than before, because this time they’d know exactly where to look.”

Rhys had gone quiet at the edge of the room, still holding the tablet he’d brought down from the server room, and I could see him fitting pieces together even before I said the next part out loud.

“Those shell companies your people uncovered,” I said, looking at him now instead of Flourish. “They weren’t built by strangers chasing money. They were built by people on both sides of this conflict. Moving funds, moving information, moving people, all without triggering anything the modern pack councils would notice. It’s how the searching stayed hidden for as long as it did.”

“How long?” Rhys asked.

“Decades. Longer than either of you have been alive.”

Harold’s jaw worked, and I watched him decide, visibly, that he wasn’t going to let the next question wait.

“The tunnels,” he said. “Under Stonehedge. Who built them?”

This was the part I’d hoped to avoid saying out loud in front of him specifically, but there wasn’t a version of this conversation left where I got to choose that.

“Members of your own family,” I said. “Generations back. The tunnels weren’t dug to hide from anyone outside Stonehedge. They were built to watch the bloodline. To monitor it. Contain it, if it ever became necessary.”

“That’s not possible,” Harold said, but his voice had already lost the certainty behind the words.

“It’s more than possible. It’s documented. Somewhere in the vault we just came out of, there are records with your family’s own seal on them.”

He didn’t answer that. He looked, for a moment, like a man trying to hold two different versions of his own history in his hands at once and finding neither of them light enough to carry comfortably.

Rhys crouched near the crate of recovered documents still sitting open on the floor and pulled out a photograph I hadn’t seen yet, the edges soft with age. He held it up without a word.

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12:38 Thu, Oct 1

Chapter 268 Blood Claim

21

Finished

I recognized it before he’d even fully turned it toward me, and something in my chest went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature of the chamber.

It was Garret standing beside me, younger, both of us barely out of our twenties.

And beside us, close enough that his shoulder brushed mine in the photo, stood a man I hadn’t spoken of in years, because I’d been told, and had believed, that he was dead.

“Who is that?” Harold asked, though something in his voice told me he’d already guessed the answer wouldn’t be simple.

I made myself look at the photograph a moment longer before I answered.

“His name is Roderick,” I said. “He’s family to you, Harold. Distant, but family. I was told he died before you were born.”

“He didn’t.”

“No,” I said. “Apparently, he didn’t.”

Voss shifted at the edge of my vision, and I caught something in his expression I couldn’t quite name. Not surprise. Recognition, maybe, like a name he’d heard before somewhere far from this room.

“You knew him,” I said, turning on him. “Didn’t you.”

Voss didn’t answer right away, and the silence stretched long enough that Flourish stepped forward, her wolf clearly done waiting for anyone in the room to be gentle about the truth.

“Someone answer her,” she said.

Voss finally looked up, and whatever calm he’d carried into this chamber earlier had thinned considerably.

“Roderick didn’t just survive,” he said quietly. “He’s the one who’s been running the Eastern Army’s tunnel network for the last fifteen years.”

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