Ch. I Refuse to Be Your Luna 276 I Refuse to Be Your Luna 276

Chapter 276 The Wolves Bowed

Lady Flourish’s POV

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I stood in the middle of the chamber with dozens of wolves pressed low to the stone floor, heads down, bodies still, and none of it made me feel like anything other than furious.

“Get up,” I said. “All of you.”

Nobody moved. My wolf paced under my skin, unsure whether to feel steadied by the display or sick over it, and honestly I didn’t have an answer for her either.

Voss stood a few feet away, watching the scene like it belonged to him, like he’d built it piece by piece and was only now presenting the finished thing.

“They won’t rise until you tell them to,” he said. “That’s not a trick. That’s just what the blood does.”

“I didn’t ask the blood to do anything.”

“No,” he agreed. “You never asked for any of this. That doesn’t change what you are.”

I looked around the room at faces I didn’t know, some old enough that their fur had gone gray at the muzzle even in human form, some young enough that they should have been anywhere else but here, kneeling to a stranger because of something buried in her veins.

“Why do they follow you?” I asked him. “If this bloodline supposedly outranks everything, why were you the one giving orders a minute ago?”

Something flickered across his face, there and gone fast enough that I almost missed it.

“Because there wasn’t a bloodline to follow,” he said. “Not one that showed itself. For fifteen years I’ve been the closest thing this army had to a direction. That doesn’t mean I ever claimed to outrank what you are.”

“You attacked Stonehedge tonight.”

“I confirmed you existed. There’s a difference.”

“Not from where I was standing.”

He didn’t argue that point, which told me more than an argument would have.

“The old packs splintered generations ago because there was no First Alpha heir left to hold them together,” he said instead. “No central authority. Just territories fighting each other over scraps of a system nobody living remembers building. These wolves,” he gestured at the

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Chapter 276 The Wolves Bowed

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kneeling rows around us, “have spent their whole lives serving something abstract. A rumor. A bloodline nobody could prove existed. Now it’s standing in front of them.”

“So what, I’m supposed to just accept a crown I never asked for?”

“You’re supposed to accept what you already are.”

‘He wants a puppet with teeth, my wolf said, low and wary. ‘Someone whose blood does the ruling so he never has to answer for the decisions himself!’

I believed her. It fit too neatly not to.

“I won’t do it,” I said, loud enough that it echoed across the whole chamber. “I’m not becoming anyone’s ruler because of something I inherited without a say in it. Not for you. Not for them. Not for anyone standing in this room.”

Voss’s expression didn’t change right away, but something around us did. I felt it before I understood what it was, a shift in the air, in the way the kneeling wolves held themselves.

One near the front lifted his head first, an older man with silver threaded through dark hair, and instead of looking at Voss for direction the way I assumed he would, he turned his eyes toward me and stayed there.

“She refuses him,” someone murmured, somewhere off to my left, and it wasn’t a question.

More heads came up. Not all at once, more like a slow wave working its way backward through the rows, wolf after wolf turning their attention away from Voss and settling it on me instead, still kneeling, still lowered, but watching me now like I was the one they’d actually come here

for.

“Stand down,” Voss said, sharp, aimed at the older man in front. “I didn’t authorize this.”

The man didn’t move.

“I said stand down.”

Nothing. Not defiance exactly, nothing that loud or deliberate, just a room full of wolves quietly deciding his voice no longer carried the weight it used to a few minutes ago.

I watched Voss’s composure crack in real time, something tightening around his eyes that hadn’t been there a moment before, and for the first time since I’d walked into this chamber, he looked less like a man running an army and more like one watching it slip out from under him.

“This isn’t how tonight was supposed to go,” he said, and I wasn’t sure if he meant it for me or for himself.

“I don’t care how you planned it.”

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Chapter 276 The Wolves Bowed

“You don’t understand what you’re refusing.”

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“I understand exactly what I’m refusing,” I said. “A crown built on fear and bloodline obligation and fifteen years of you deciding what these people should believe. I’m not interested in replacing you at the top of that. I’m not interested in the top of it at all.”

The silence that followed wasn’t peaceful. It sat heavy in the chamber, dozens of wolves still kneeling, still watching, still waiting for something from me I hadn’t decided how to give them yet, if I ever would.

Voss looked at the rows of bowed heads, then back at me, and whatever calculation was running behind his eyes didn’t land anywhere comfortable for him.

“They’ll wait,” he said quietly. “However long it takes. That’s the problem with blood loyalty. It doesn’t need your permission to exist.”

I didn’t answer that, because there wasn’t an answer that fixed it, not tonight, not with a room full of strangers on their knees in front of me and my own wolf still unsure whether to feel proud or horrified at how easily they’d turned.

Behind me, near the tunnel entrance we’d come through, I heard Rhys shift his weight, the faint scrape of his boot against stone, and I realized none of us had planned for what came after this moment.

We’d planned for a fight. Nobody had planned for a room full of wolves choosing me over the man who’d led them here.

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