Ch. I Refuse to Be Your Luna 277 I Refuse to Be Your Luna 277

Chapter 277 Choices

Lady Flourish’s POV

M

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Voss moved before I’d finished processing what Rhys’s shifting weight behind me even meant.

I caught the change in his scent half a second before his body followed it, something sharper cutting through the calm he’d been performing this whole time, and then he was already mid lunge, faster than a man his age had any right to be.

I didn’t have time to think about it. My wolf took over, bones rearranging under my skin in a rush that left my ears ringing, and I met him halfway across the stone floor instead of waiting to see what he intended.

The kneeling wolves scattered back from us in a wave, nobody moving to help him, nobody moving to help me either, just a wide ring of silent bodies watching the two of us collide.

His claws caught my shoulder before I got my footing right, and pain flashed hot down my arm, but I twisted into it instead of away, driving my own claws into his side hard enough that he grunted and staggered.

“You think refusing me changes anything,” he said, breathing hard, circling. “You think a room full of wolves choosing you tonight means they’ll still choose you tomorrow, when the Eastern Army needs someone who actually knows how to run it?”

“I never said I wanted to run it.”

“That won’t matter.”

He came at me again, low this time, aiming for my legs the way the attackers back at Stonehedge had, and I sidestepped just enough that his shoulder clipped mine instead of taking me down.

I answered with a strike across his back that opened a gash he’d feel for days, and he snarled, spinning to face me with something close to real anger now instead of the practiced calm from before.

“Garret knew,” he said suddenly, and the words landed strange in the middle of a fight, out of rhythm with everything else happening. “Long before tonight. He knew exactly what you were the day you were born.”

I froze for half a second too long, and he used it, driving a fist into my ribs that sent me stumbling back a step.

“He’s spent your whole life preparing you,” Voss went on, circling while I caught my breath. “Quietly. Carefully. Every decision he made about how you were raised, who you were kept

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Chapter 277 Choices

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away from, what you were allowed to know. All of it building toward the possibility that one day you’d have to become exactly what you are right now.”

‘Don’t listen to him,’ my wolf said, sharp, though even she sounded less certain than I needed her to be. ‘He’s trying to throw you off balance.’

It was working regardless of whether that was his intention.

I came back at him harder than I meant to, more anger behind it than strategy, and he took the hit across his jaw without fully blocking it, blood welling at the corner of his mouth.

“Ask her,” he said, nodding past me toward where Elara stood frozen at the edge of the circle. “Ask her if I’m lying.”

The fight ended not because either of us backed down, but because two of the kneeling wolves finally broke formation and stepped between us, forcing enough distance that neither of us could reach the other without going through them first. Voss didn’t fight that.

He let himself be pulled back, chest still heaving, eyes still on me.

I didn’t wait to see what happened to him after that. I turned straight to Elara, ignoring the throb in my ribs and the blood running down my arm.

“Is it true?”

She didn’t answer right away, and that alone told me most of what I needed to know.

“Elara.”

“Yes,” she said finally, quiet enough that I had to lean in to catch it over the low murmur still moving through the kneeling wolves around us. “Garret has known since you were a baby.”

“He never told me.”

“He couldn’t tell you. Not without putting a target on you before you were old enough to understand what that meant.”

“So instead he just decided things for me. Quietly. For years.” My voice came out harder than I meant it to, though I didn’t try to soften it. “Every school he pulled me from. Every trip he cancelled. Every time he told me it was for my safety and never explained why. That was this.”

“Some of it,” Elara admitted. “Not all of it was calculated. But yes. Some of it was.”

I thought about the years I’d spent assuming my father’s overprotectiveness came from grief, from losing my mother too early, from some private fear he never quite explained.

I’d built an entire understanding of him around that assumption. Around a version of events

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Chapter 277 Choices

that made sense to a child who didn’t know any better and had no reason to ask harder questions.

Nei

Finished

“He inherited this the same way I did,” Elara said, stepping closer, though I didn’t move toward her in return. “He didn’t choose it either, Flourish. Whatever generation came before him taught him how to protect the bloodline, and he did the only thing he knew how to do with that lesson.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“No,” she agreed. “It doesn’t.”

I looked around the chamber at the wolves still watching me, some kneeling, some standing now in loose, uncertain clusters, all of them waiting to see what I’d do next, and none of it answered the question actually eating at me.

How much of my life had been mine. How many choices I thought belonged to me had actually been shaped years in advance by people who never bothered to ask if I wanted any of

Nobody in that chamber had an answer for that, and I didn’t expect one. I just needed somewhere to stand while I figured out how angry I was allowed to be about it.

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