Ch. I Refuse to Be Your Luna 282 I Refuse to Be Your Luna 282

Chapter 282 The Strange Man

Lady Flourish’s POV

The passage narrowed the further I walked, stone pressing closer on both sides until I had to turn my shoulders slightly to move through it, my wolf reading every draft of air like it might carry a warning I couldn’t afford to miss.

The tunnel opened into a chamber lit by a single lantern set on an overturned crate, throwing more shadow than light across the walls.

A man stood near it, waiting, his hands folded in front of him with the kind of patience that came from never having to rush for anyone in his life.

He was older than Voss, silver threaded fully through his hair now, dressed in a coat that probably cost more than most people’s cars.

“You came alone,” he said. “Good. I wasn’t sure you would.”

My wolf caught his scent before I finished processing the sentence, and my whole body reacted to it the way it had at the entrance, except closer now, unmistakable in a way that made my skin prickle.

It wasn’t threatening. It was familiar in a way I had no memory to explain, the same recognition my body had given Elara the moment I saw her face again after years of believing her dead.

“Who are you?” I asked, though some part of me already suspected the shape of the answer before he gave it.

“My name is Callum.” He said it simply, without theater, like a man used to introductions mattering less than the substance behind them. “I imagine your wolf already told you more than my name did.”

“It’s telling me you’re family.”

“Close enough.” His mouth moved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “I’m your mother’s older brother. Your uncle.”

I stared at him, waiting for my mind to catch up to what my body had already accepted. “Elara has a brother.”

“Had,” he said. “For a long time, everyone assumed our whole line had ended. It was safer that way. Easier for her, easier for me, easier for anyone still hunting the last living pieces of this bloodline to give up and look elsewhere.”

“You’ve known she was alive this whole time.”

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Chapter 282 The Strange Man

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“I’ve known everything about her this whole time,” Callum said. “Where she was hiding. When she had you. What she gave up to keep you safe from people who would have used you the moment they confirmed you existed.”

My wolf paced under my skin, unsure whether to feel comforted or cornered by how much this stranger apparently knew about my entire life. “Then why are we only meeting now? Why not years ago, if you knew all of that?”

“Because knowing and acting are different animals,” he said. “I’ve spent years funding certain things quietly. Watching certain movements. Making sure the war being fought over our family’s blood didn’t accidentally end the family itself before I decided which side, if any, deserved my support.”

“You’ve been funding the war,” I repeated. “Voss’s side, or someone else’s?”

“Neither, and both, depending on how you look at it.” He walked a slow half circle around the lantern, the light catching the sharp line of his jaw. “I’ve moved money through channels connected to more than one faction over the years, because information moves along the same channels money does, and I wanted to know everything long before I ever showed my face to anyone carrying this blood.”

‘He’s telling the truth about that much,’ my wolf said quietly, still wary, still circling the same question I was. ‘But he hasn’t told you why now. Why tonight.’

“So why show yourself now?” I asked. “Why not keep watching from wherever you’ve been watching from?”

Callum stopped moving and looked at me directly, and for the first time something in his expression cracked slightly, showing a tiredness underneath all that careful composure. “Because I wanted to see you myself before I decided anything else. The daughter of the First Alpha, standing in front of me instead of existing as a rumor I paid people to confirm every few years. I needed to know if you were worth the risk of finally stepping into this.”

“And? Am I?”

“I’m still deciding,” he said, and there was no cruelty in it, only honesty. “But I’ve decided enough to tell you something you’re going to need to hear before it happens rather than after.”

Something in his tone made my stomach tighten before he even said the words.

“Your father’s company,” Callum said. “Steele Holdings. It will collapse within the week.”

I frowned. “Steele Holdings has weathered worse than a bad quarter before.”

“Not this time.” He said it without satisfaction, which somehow made it worse. “The banks calling in loans, the bonds going unsubscribed, the sudden and very targeted withdrawal of

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confidence from every investor who’s touched that company in the last decade. That’s not market forces, Flourish. That’s me.”

My breath caught somewhere in my chest. “You’re the one destroying my father’s company.”

“I am.”

“Why?”

Callum’s face didn’t change, but something behind his eyes went very old and very cold, the look of a man who had been carrying a debt for twenty years and had finally decided it was time to collect it.

“Because your mother loved a man who let her be poisoned in his own house while he looked the other way,” he said. “Because I was told she died of illness for two decades before I learned the truth, and I have spent every one of those years deciding exactly how I would make him understand what he took from us.”

He let that sit in the space between us, the lantern flickering slightly as some draft moved through the tunnel behind me.

“I didn’t do it for revenge alone,” he added. “I did it because a man capable of that kind of silence has no business holding power over anyone, including you. But I won’t lie to you and pretend the revenge isn’t part of it too.”

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I Refuse To Be Your Luna