Ch. I Refuse to Be Your Luna 278 I Refuse to Be Your Luna 278

Chapter 278 Garrets Truth.

Garret’s POV

21

Finished

I heard the front door close before I heard her voice, and I already knew from the weight of her footsteps down the hall that whatever happened at Moonbridge tonight had gone badly for me, even if it hadn’t gone badly for her.

Flourish stood in the doorway of my study with blood dried along her sleeve and something in her expression I hadn’t seen directed at me since she was a teenager who’d just caught me in a lie about her mother’s death.

“Sit down,” she said, and it wasn’t a request.

I sat.

“Voss told me you knew,” she said. “That you’ve known what I am since I was a baby. Elara already confirmed it. I want to hear it from you.”

There wasn’t a version of this conversation left where I got to soften it, so I didn’t try.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve known since before you could walk.”

She didn’t react the way I expected, no shouting, no immediate accusation, just a long, level stare that somehow felt worse than anger would have.

“How long did you think you’d get away with never telling me?”

“I thought I’d get to choose when,” I said. “I never expected the choice to get taken out of my hands the way it clearly has been.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” I agreed. “It’s not.”

‘She deserves the whole thing, I thought, and for once I didn’t argue with myself about it. There wasn’t room left to argue.

“Your mother carried the First Alpha bloodline before you did,” I said. “I knew that before I married her. I knew there was a chance any child we had would carry it too, and I told myself, back then, that if it happened, I’d raise you to handle it. Prepare you for it. I genuinely believed, for a while, that you might one day step into that authority and use it well.”

“Then why didn’t you prepare me for anything? Why did I grow up thinking I was just your daughter?”

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Chapter 278 Garrets Truth.

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“Because the moment people started actively hunting for confirmation, preparing you for the role stopped being the priority. Keeping you alive became the priority.”

She crossed her arms, and I watched her jaw tighten the exact way mine did when I was holding something back.

“Explain that.”

“When you were young, still small enough that none of this should have mattered yet, we had reason to believe certain memories tied to your heritage needed to be suppressed. Not erased. Suppressed. There’s a difference, even if it doesn’t feel like one to you right now.”

“Suppressed by who?”

“By people I trusted at the time. People who convinced me it was the only way to keep multiple factions from confirming what you were before you were old enough to defend yourself against any of them.”

“You let someone go into my head.”

“I let someone protect you the only way anyone knew how, given what we were facing.”

“That’s the same thing you just told Elara justified, isn’t it,” she said, and I heard the disgust creeping into her voice now, finally, the reaction I’d been braced for since she walked in. “Everyone in this family keeps saying the same sentence. We did it to protect you. Like that erases what it actually took from me.”

I didn’t have a defense for that, because she was right, and I’d known she was right for years even while I kept telling myself otherwise.

“Magnus knew,” I said instead, because if I was going to lay it all out, I wasn’t going to leave pieces out to make myself look better by comparison. “Magnus knew from very early on. So did two of the elders who’ve since passed. It wasn’t just me making these decisions alone. It was a group of us, deciding together, over years, that the truth stayed buried regardless of what it cost you to grow up without it.”

“A group of you,” she repeated. “Deciding my life for me. For years.”

“Yes.”

“Did any of you ever once consider what I might have wanted?”

“No,” I said, and it came out rougher than I meant it to. “We considered what would keep you breathing. We told ourselves that was the same thing as considering you.”

She didn’t say anything to that for a long moment, and I let the silence sit, because I’d earned every second of her not knowing what to say to me,

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Chapter 278 Garrets Truth

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“I framed it to myself as protection,” I said eventually, quieter now. “For years. I told myself every choice I made about your childhood, every school I pulled you from, every friend I kept you away from without explanation, all of it was protection. And it was, in a way. But it was also me deciding you didn’t get to know your own history. That you didn’t get the right to understand what you were carrying, or make your own choices about it, because I’d already made them for you before you were old enough to argue.”

“You’re only saying that because I already found out on my own.”

“Maybe,” I admitted. “That doesn’t make it less true.”

She looked at me like she was deciding whether that admission counted for anything at all, and I honestly didn’t know what answer I was hoping for.

Before either of us said anything else, Mira appeared in the doorway, her expression tight enough that I knew before she spoke it wasn’t going to be good news.

“Alpha Garret,” she said. “I’m sorry to interrupt. Someone’s accessed the family records again.”

My stomach dropped straight through the floor. “From where?”

She hesitated, glancing between me and Flourish like she wasn’t sure which one of us she should be more worried about telling.

“Inside the house,” she said. “It’s happening right now.”

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I Refuse To Be Your Luna