TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 134

CHAPTER 90: SHUT UP, DEVIKA–1

EMBER’S POV

The question catches me off guard, hitting somewhere soft and unprotested.

“Every day,” I hear myself say, and my voice sounds strange, distant, like it’s coming from somewhere outside my body. “Every single day, I thought about leaving. About packing a bag and disappearing in the middle of the night. About starting over somewhere he couldn’t find me.”

“And yet you stayed.” Harrison tilts his head, studying me like I’m a specimen under glass. “For eight years, you stayed. Why?”

Because I was scared.

Because I had nowhere to go.

Because he convinced me I deserved it.

Because every time I tried to leave, I’d stop dead by the door.

Because my own mother blamed me.

Because my own father was too drunk to answer the phone.

Because everyone I was supposed to be able to trust had already proven they couldn’t be trusted, and I had no one left, no one who cared, no one who would help me escape the prison they’d sold me into.

Because if I never met Knox, I would have gone back to him.

But I don’t say any of that.

Instead, I look Harrison dead in the eye and ask a question of my own.

“Why did you let it happen?”

Harrison blinks, the first slash in his composure all evening.

“I already answered-”

“No.” I lean forward, something hot and angry rising in my chest. “You told us you knew. You told us you considered it discipline. But you didn’t tell us why you let it continue. Why you stood by and did nothing while your son destroyed me. You’re a powerful man, Harrison. You could have intervened at any time. You could have told Gale to stop, and he would have stopped, because he’s terrified of you. I’ve seen the way he flinches when you move. I’ve seen the way he shrinks when you speak. So why didn’t you use that power to protect me? Why did you let him hurt me for eight years when you could have ended it with a single word?”

The table has gone deathly silent.

Harrison stares at me for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind his eyes.

< CHAPTER 90 SHUT UP DEVIKA 1

Cam

“Because you were convenient,” he says finally, and the honesty of it is more brutal than any lie. “A wife gave Gale legitimacy. A marriage gave our family alliances A woman hid his shameful perversion. As long as you stayed, as long as you kept quiet, as long as you played your role, the arrangement benefited everyone.” He shrugs, a small, dismissive gesture. “Your happiness was never part of the equation. It was never meant to be.”

Something snaps inside me.

Years of silence. Years of swallowing my pain and hiding my bruises and pretending everything was fine because that’s what I was taught to do.

Years of being told I was worthless, I was nothing, I deserved every terrible thing that happened to me.

And now this man, this monster in a tailored suit, is sitting across from me and admitting that he let his son torture me because I was convenient.

Because my suffering was a small price to pay for alliances and legitimacy and a family name that meant more to him than my life ever could.

“You sold me!” I scream, and my voice is shaking but I don’t care anymore. “All of you. You sat at a table

just like this one and you decided that a seventeen–year–old girl was worth less than a treaty and some

cheap fucking whiskey and whatever scraps Harrison threw your way.”

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