I Refuse to Be Your Luna

Ch. I Refuse to Be Your Luna 280 I Refuse to Be Your Luna 280

Chapter 280 The Second Enemy

Lady Flourish’s POV

The panel kept humming after it lit, letters assembling themselves across the screen too deliberately for anyone to call it a malfunction.

Finished

SO YOU FINALLY REMEMBER THE TRUTH. GOOD. NOW ASK ELARA WHAT SHE DID TO

KEEP IT BURIED.

I read it twice before I trusted myself to speak. “Someone get Elara in here.”

Mira had already gone for her, and by the time my mother appeared in the doorway, the message was still glowing steady on the wall panel, unchanged, waiting.

Elara stopped when she saw it. I watched her face while she read it, looking for anything that might tell me whether the words came from her or about her.

“Did you send this?” I asked.

“No.” Her voice cracked on the single word, and whatever composure she’d managed to hold onto through the last several hours seemed to slip a little more with every second the message stayed lit. “Flourish, I would never write something like that. Why would I accuse myself?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “That’s why I’m asking.”

She crossed the room and put both hands flat against the edge of the desk, staring at the screen like it might explain itself if she looked hard enough.

“I swear to you,” she said. “I don’t know who sent this.”

Rhys had already dropped into the chair at the terminal, fingers moving across the keys, tracing whatever signal had triggered the system this time.

I stood behind him, arms crossed, watching numbers and location data scroll past faster than I could read.

“It’s not coming from Moonbridge,” he said after a minute. “Not the Eastern Army’s usual relay either. This is local.”

“Local how local,” I asked.

“Inside Stonehedge,” he said, and something in his voice made it clear he didn’t like saying it any more than I liked hearing it. “Somewhere on the estate grounds.”

Elara’s hands tightened against the desk edge. “That’s not possible.”

1/3

12:41 Thu, Oct 1

Chapter 280 The Second Enemy

“The signal doesn’t lie,” Rhys said, not unkindly, just tired.

Finished

I turned back to the box of photographs still sitting open on the floor where I’d left it earlier, needing something to do with my hands while my mind worked through what that meant.

Someone inside Stonehedge, someone close enough to the estate’s own network to trigger this system without needing outside help, had sent that message.

I dug through the remaining photos, half looking, half just needing the motion, and stopped hard on one near the bottom of the pile.

Magnus again, older this time than the photograph I’d found earlier, standing beside Voss in what looked like some kind of formal gathering, other faces I didn’t recognize milling in the background.

And just behind them both, close enough to be part of the same conversation, stood Phina.

She looked younger in the photograph, her hair different, but it was unmistakably her.

“Rhys.” I held it up.

He glanced over from the terminal, and whatever he saw in my expression made him stop typing for a second.

“That’s Phina,” he said.

“With Magnus and Voss. In the same photograph.”

Elara came around the desk to look, and her face went through something complicated, confusion layered under something closer to dread.

“I don’t know when this was taken,” she said. “I don’t recognize the room.”

“Someone does,” I said. “Someone in this family has been sitting across a dinner table from her for years while she was connected to this the whole time.”

None of us had time to sit with that thought, because the estate wards chose that exact moment to flare, the same low hum I’d felt earlier at Moonbridge rolling through the walls of this room, faint but unmistakable to anyone with a wolf paying attention.

“That’s the mark, mine said immediately, sharp with recognition. ‘The same one from the tunnels. Someone with the bloodline is close. Right now!

Rhys’s hands went still on the keyboard. “The wards just spiked again.”

“Where,” I said.

2/3

12:41 Thu, Oct 1

Chapter 280 The Second Enemy

Finished

“Same signature as before. It’s reading as another confirmed presence. Somewhere on the grounds.”

Another bearer. Another person carrying what I carried, close enough tonight that the estate’s oldest protections had felt the need to respond to it twice in the same hour.

I didn’t get more than a few seconds to turn that over in my head before the terminal screen changed again, the earlier message replaced with something shorter.

RETURN TO THE OLD TUNNEL. ALONE.

That was all. No explanation, no threat spelled out, nothing that told me who was asking or why they expected me to walk back into the same tunnels where all of this had started tonight.

“Alone,” Elara repeated, reading it over my shoulder. “Absolutely not.”

“I wasn’t planning to,” I said.

“Do you know who sent it?” Rhys asked her directly, and I watched her actually consider the question before answering, like she was running through every name she could think of and coming up short on all of them.

“No,” she said finally, and something in the admission seemed to cost her more than anything else she’d told me tonight. “I don’t. For the first time since any of this started, I genuinely have no idea who’s on the other end of that message.”