Ch. I Refuse to Be Your Luna 283 I Refuse to Be Your Luna 283

Finished

Chapter 283 Her Mother’s Grave

Lady Flourish’s POV

Damian was waiting at the tunnel entrance exactly where I’d left him, and the moment I stepped back into the light his hand found my arm like he needed to confirm I was actually solid before he let himself breathe again.

“Well?” he asked.

I told him everything on the walk back to the house, the name, the confession, the promise about Steele Holdings, watching his expression shift with each new piece the way a man tracking a threat rearranges his sense of where the danger actually lives.

He didn’t interrupt once, though I could feel his wolf pacing under the surface the entire time, restless with everything he couldn’t do anything about yet.

“He’s declaring war on your father,” Damian said finally. “In your mother’s name. Without asking either of you first.”

“I don’t think he sees it that way.”

“I don’t care how he sees it.”

I understood the anger, mostly because I recognized a version of it sitting in my own chest, tangled up with something that wasn’t quite gratitude and wasn’t quite dread either.

My wolf hadn’t settled since the tunnel, still turning Callum’s scent over like a puzzle piece that fit somewhere but not cleanly.

“There’s something I need to do,” I said. “Tonight, if you’ll come with me.”

Damian didn’t ask what. He just nodded and reached for the car keys.

I hadn’t been back to the cemetery since the day I learned my mother was alive, since the ground I’d once wept over turned out to be hiding nothing at all, an empty box beneath an honest looking stone.

The drive there felt longer than it used to, though the route hadn’t changed, just my understanding of what waited at the end of it.

The headstone looked the same as it always had. Elara’s name carved into gray granite, dates that had never told the truth, flowers I’d replaced every few months out of a habit I couldn’t quite let go of even now.

Damian stood a few steps back, giving me the space without making it feel like distance.

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12:42 Thu, Oct 1

Chapter 283 Her Mother’s Grave

21

Finished

I crouched in front of the stone the way I always used to, though this time the words came slower, less certain of who or what I was actually speaking to.

“I know now,” I said quietly. “Everything. What you carried. Why you did what you did. I spent years standing here thinking I was talking to nothing, and I guess in a way I still am, but it feels different tonight.”

My wolf pressed close, quiet in a way that felt more like listening than grieving.

“I’m not angry anymore,” I said. “I thought I would be, once I found out the truth, but mostly I’m just tired. Tired of everyone in this family deciding things for me and calling it protection. Tired of finding out how much of my life was already written before I ever got a vote.”

I touched the edge of the stone, cool under my fingers even in the mild night air.

“I hope, wherever you actually are, that you’re not carrying all of it alone anymore. I have Damian now. I have people who’d rather die than let something happen to me. I think you’d have liked him, honestly, even if he does have an ego the size of Stonehedge itself.”

Behind me, I heard the faintest exhale that might have been a laugh, quickly swallowed.

I stood eventually, brushing grass off my knees, and turned to find Damian watching me with an expression I didn’t have a name for yet, something too soft for the man who’d nearly torn a door off its hinges earlier tonight to reach me.

“Ready?” he asked.

I nodded, and we started back toward the car, my wolf finally quieting into something closer to peace than it had managed all evening.

That was when I noticed him.

A figure stood further up the hill, still and upright among the older, more weathered graves, watching us the way someone watches something they’ve watched many times before without ever letting themselves get closer.

My wolf recognized the shape of him before the scent even reached me properly, that same old money, old blood weight settling over my senses again.

“Callum,” I said quietly,

Damian’s whole body shifted beside me, his wolf rising fast and sharp, ready to close the distance between us and the man on the hill in a matter of seconds.

“Don’t,” I said, catching his arm.

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12:42 Thu, Oct 1

Chapter 283 Her Mother’s Grave

“Flourish.”

“Let him be.”

21

Finished

Damian looked at me like I’d lost my mind, and maybe I had, a little, but something about the stillness of Callum’s posture up there told me this wasn’t a man preparing to move against us.

This was a man standing exactly where he always stood, the way he probably had for years, visiting a grave that held nothing while never once letting the daughter inside it see him do it.

“He’s been coming here,” I said. “Hasn’t he. All this time.”

Damian didn’t answer, but his shoulders eased slightly, the readiness for a fight softening into something closer to grudging understanding.

“Grief doesn’t always look like grief,” I said, mostly to myself. “Sometimes it just looks like a man standing very still on a hill.”

We left him there. I didn’t look back again, not because I didn’t care, but because some part of me understood he wouldn’t want me to.

We were almost at the car when Damian’s phone buzzed hard enough that I heard it from where I stood. He pulled it out, and I watched his jaw tighten as he read whatever Rhys had sent

him.

“What?” I asked.

He turned the screen toward me without a word.

Steele Holdings stock had dropped nearly forty percent in the last two hours, the numbers still falling in real time, red arrows stacked one after another like something bleeding out where everyone could watch.

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