I Refuse To Be Your Luna (Flourish and Harold) novel Chapter 161

11:59 Thu, Oct 1

1 Refuse To Be Your Luna

Chapter 161 Defend My Dignity

Lady Flourish’s POV

Finished

I spent the entire next day buried in merger paperwork, the Poppy Farlane meeting from that morning still sitting unresolved in the back of my mind.

She’d shown me exactly one flagged inconsistency in the poster complaint before running out of time, promising the rest “once she’d confirmed a few things properly.”

I hadn’t decided yet whether that was caution or a stall tactic, and I didn’t have the bandwidth today to work out which.

I was gathering my things to finally head home when my phone rang. Ethan.

“Ms. Steele, sorry to bother you. Are you free tonight? I want to revisit the infringement matter.”

I raised an eyebrow at my own reflection in the darkened window, mildly surprised. “I can meet, though I’ll be a little late. Eight o’clock, the cafe on the ground floor of my building. Does that work?”

“Fine,” he said, and hung up before I could ask what had changed his mind.

I didn’t have to wonder long. A push notification lit up my screen the moment I set the phone down, and the reason clicked into place instantly.

A plagiarism debate over “Fatebound” had exploded straight to the top of the trending charts.

If Stonehedge hadn’t poured so much promotional weight behind the track yesterday, neither the song nor its rookie singer would have registered on anyone’s radar at all.

Instead, the very publicity meant to elevate Phina had handed the entire controversy a spotlight bright enough to be impossible to ignore.

A respected music critic had already dissected both tracks side by side, laying the overlapping melodies and phrasing out in exhaustive, undeniable detail.

With both lyrics and composition credited solely to Phina, there was nowhere left for the blame to land but squarely on her.

I sat with that for a moment, genuinely puzzled.

A company the size of Stonehedge Studios should have had a crisis team ready to smother something like this within the hour.

1/3

20

Finished

Instead the story had been sitting at the top of the trending list for most of the afternoon, gathering momentum nobody with real resources should have allowed.

11:59 Thu, Oct 1

Chapter 161 Defend My Dignity

My wolf pricked at the wrongness of it, some instinct insisting the timing itself was the tell, not the scandal.

Scrolling through the comments told the rest of the story.

Phina had no genuine fanbase built up yet, nothing organic enough to fight back against the tide once it turned.

The insults piled up in the thousands before the platform finally locked the thread entirely.

I closed the office up and arrived at the cafe exactly at eight.

“Ms. Steele. Glad you came.” Ethan looked worn thin, the particular exhaustion of someone who’d spent the day fighting a battle he hadn’t chosen the terms of.

I inclined my head and got straight to the point. “Mr. Carver, thank you for waiting. I take it this is about the trending story.”

His fist hit the table hard enough to rattle the cups between us. “Exactly. Stonehedge’s lawyers came to see me before any of this broke. Made it very clear: keep pushing this and I’d be trading a friendship for an enemy I couldn’t afford. So I took the payout. Five hundred thousand, and a promise to let it go.” His jaw tightened. “And then this morning, they had the audacity to accuse me of extortion. The police pulled me in for questioning before I’d even finished my coffee.”

I felt something cold settle low in my chest. I’d underestimated exactly how far Harold’s family was willing to go to protect this particular investment, and that miscalculation sat uneasily against everything else I’d learned about Stonehedge over the past few weeks.

“What happened at the station?” I asked.

He laughed, short and bitter. “I was furious enough to tell them the whole story on the spot. Handed the money back before they’d even finished the paperwork. They gave me a lecture and sent me home.”

“So the compensation is the only thing they actually had against you.” I nodded slowly, watching the pieces settle into place. “And now you want to pursue this properly.”

“Even if I never see a cent of it, I want my name back.” His voice had gone hard, resolute in a way it hadn’t been the last time we’d sat across from each other. “I’ve already returned every dollar. There’s nothing left for them to hold over me.”

“The critic who broke this story,” I said carefully. “Was that your contact?”

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify