TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 129

CHAPTER 86: LITTLE BIRDIE

EMBER’S POV

My mother, young and hungry and desperate to claw her way out of poverty, latching onto the first man who seemed like he could give her more.

My father, spinning elaborate lies about wealth and status, letting her believe he was the rich alpha driving those flashy cars when really he was just the chauffeur, borrowing someone else’s shine to make himself look brighter.

I think about the moment she found out. Pregnant and trapped and furious, stuck with a man who had nothing to offer but broken promises and empty pockets.

She’d gambled everything on a lie and lost, and she never forgave him for it. Never forgave me for being the proof of her mistake.

I think about the years that followed. The cramped apartments that always smelled like cigarette smoke and stale alcohol.

The screaming matches that started before dinner and didn’t end until one of them passed out or stormed

off into the night.

The crashing glasses, the slammed doors, the words that cut deeper than any sword. Words like

worthless. Words like mistake. Words like I wish you’d never been born.

I was six years old the first time I heard my mother say that.

She never hid her resentment. I was the chain around her ankle, the living reminder of the life she’d been cheated out of, and she made sure I knew it every single day.

She called me names that still echo in the darkest corners of my mind. Left me alone in parking lots white she chased after whatever man she thought might be her next ticket out.

Forgot to feed me for days at a time because she was too busy drowning her disappointment in cheap wine and expensive dreams.

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I never blamed her for doing what she had to do to survive. I understood desperation, understood hunger, understood the kind of poverty that makes you willing to do almost anything to escape.

But did she have to hate me too?

I never asked to be born. I never asked to be the consequence of their bad decisions.

I was just a child, small and scared and desperate for someone to love me, and instead I got caught in the crossfire of a war I never started.

My father tried, in the beginning. I remember him taking me to school events when my mother couldn’t be bothered, sitting in the back row at my recitals, buying me ice cream on the way home and calling me his

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little Birdie.

I remember the way his face used to light up when he saw me, like I was something precious, something

worth protecting.

And then the drinking started.

Or maybe it had always been there and just didn’t notice until it consumed him completely.

Until the warm brown eyes I loved turned distant

Until his words started slurring together and his hands started shaking and the man who used to carry me on his shoulders disappeared into someone I barely knew.

I saw the worst versions of him when he had the bottle in his hand. The stumbling. The shouting. The way he’d look right through me like I wasn’t even there.

He stopped showing up to my recitals. Stopped helping with homework. Stopped being anything but a hollow shell that came home reeking of whiskey and resentment.

And when he checked out, my mother stepped up.

I wish I could say that she did so to protect me.

She turned me into her new escape plan. From the time I was sixteen, she paraded me in front of wealthy

alphas like I was livestock at auction, introducing me as a virgin, a good girl, an omega who would make

the perfect wife for anyone willing to pay the right price,

She coached me on how to smile without showing too much teeth. How to laugh at jokes that weren’t

funny.

How to make myself small and agreeable and desirable in all the ways that mattered to men who saw women as accessories rather than people.

Gale wasn’t her first choice. The Shadowmoon pack was mid–tier at best, nothing impressive enough for her gold–digging standards.

She wanted me to hold out for someone richer, more powerful, more useful to her

But then Harrison Crawford showed up.

ambitions.

He came to our cramped apartment in his expensive suit, looking around at the water–stained ceiling and the secondhand furniture with an expression of thinly veiled disgust.

He sat across from my parents at our wobbly kitchen table and laid out his offer like he was negotiating a business deal, because to him that’s exactly what it was.

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