I Refuse To Be Your Luna (Flourish and Harold) novel Chapter 284

Chapter 284 The Company Falls

Alpha Damian’s POV

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Finished

I watched Steele Holdings die in pieces over the next several days, the way a body shuts down organ by organ instead of all at once.

Banks pulled credit lines first, quietly, the kind of quiet that told me someone had made calls nobody could trace back cleanly.

Then the bond issue that should have carried the company through the quarter went entirely unsubscribed, which in my experience never happened by accident, not at that scale.

My wolf didn’t much care about market mechanics, but it recognized patience when it smelled it, and this had patience written all over it. Whoever was doing this hadn’t rushed a single

move.

Callum Voss wasn’t burning Garret’s company down in a fit of rage. He was dismantling it the way a man takes apart something he’s studied for twenty years, piece by piece, in exactly the order that would hurt the most.

“You could stop this,” I told Flourish, once, only once, because I already suspected what she’d

say.

“I don’t want it stopped.”

She said it flatly, sitting across from me at the kitchen island with a mug of tea going cold in her hands. “He let my mother die by inches in his own house and called it illness for twenty years. I’m not lifting a finger to save the roof over his head.”

I didn’t argue. My wolf understood grief that had curdled into something harder, and I wasn’t about to pretend I’d have handled it any more gracefully in her position.

Rhys found the problem two days later, buried in the financial records that were now spilling out into public filings as the company’s liquidation proceedings kicked into motion.

He called me into the study rather than sending it over a message, which told me before he said a word that it was worse than routine bad news.

“There’s a transfer,” he said, turning his laptop toward me. “Eight years old. Buried under three shell layers, moved out of Steele Holdings’ operating accounts and into something that eventually threads back to the same network we traced to the Eastern Army’s tunnel financing.”

I stared at the numbers longer than I needed to, because my mind kept trying to find a version of this that didn’t mean what it obviously meant.

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12:42 Thu, Oct 1

Chapter 284 The Company Falls

“Garret funded them,” I said.

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སྦེ

Finished

“Or he funded something adjacent to them without knowing what it actually was,” Rhys said. “I can’t prove intent from a spreadsheet. I can prove the money moved.”

Either way, it meant Garret’s business had been tangled up with the bloodline conspiracy long before Flourish ever learned what she carried, long before any of us had reason to think Steele Holdings mattered to this at all beyond being her father’s company.

I brought it straight to Magnus.

He was in his study when I found him, reading glasses pushed up into his hair, a stack of council correspondence spread across the desk in front of him.

He looked up at my expression and set his pen down slowly, the way a man does when he already senses the conversation isn’t going to be a short one.

“I need to know something,” I said, “and I need the truth, not the version you’ve been giving everyone else tonight.”

“Go on.”

“Did the council ever discuss Garret’s involvement in any of this? The tunnels, the shell networks, any of it, at the same level you discussed keeping Flourish’s blood hidden?”

Magnus’s jaw tightened, and for a long moment he didn’t answer at all, which told me plenty on its own.

“There were suspicions,” he said finally. “Years ago. Nothing confirmed. Garret’s name came up once, in a closed session, in relation to certain funding patterns that looked wrong to the elder who flagged them. It was never followed up on.”

“Why not?”

“Because following up on it would have meant admitting we suspected a sitting Alpha of financing the same people hunting the bloodline we were already hiding,” Magnus said, his voice going rough. “We had enough secrets to protect. I made the call to let it go.”

My wolf snarled low at that, the casual weight of it, another decision made quietly by men who’d decided years ago that secrecy solved more problems than it created.

“You suspected it,” I said, “and you buried it anyway.”

“I suspected it,” Magnus said, meeting my eyes without flinching, which was somehow worse than if he’d looked away. “I never confirmed it. There’s a difference, even if you don’t want to hear it right now.”

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Chapter 284 The Company Falls

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