TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 138

HAPTER 92: LAVENDER WIFE–1

EMBER’S POV

I flinch despite myself, turning my face away from the carnage, and Knox’s arm wraps around my shoulders, pulling me against his chest.

“Don’t look,” he murmurs into my hair. “They’re psychopaths.”

But I can still hear it. The wet sounds of blood dripping onto the floor. The raw, animal screams tearing

from Gale’s throat.

The horrible calm of Harrison’s voice cutting through it all like a blade.

“That,” Harrison says, “was for disappointing me. For soiling the family name with your perversions and your weakness. For being so pathetic that you couldn’t even keep your wife in line without resorting to violence that left evidence.” He leans closer to Gale, close enough that his son’s blood spatters across his pristine white shirt. “And this – this is for being a disgrace. A failure. A son so broken that he can’t even bring himself to want a woman.”

–

The disgust in his voice is undeniable, dripping with a hatred that runs bone–deep.

“You could have been something,” Harrison continues, his voice dropping to barely above a whisper. “You could have been worthy of the Crawford name. But instead you chose to be this. A deviant. A disappointment. Not even man enough to do what nature intended.”

“Stop it!”

Logan is on his feet, chair clattering to the floor behind him, his face twisted with rage and grief and something that looks almost like terror.

“Stop it,” he repeats, his voice breaking. “He’s your son. Your son. How can you do this to him?”

Harrison straightens, looking at Logan with the same expression he might give an insect that wandered onto his dinner plate.

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“He stopped being my son the moment I learned what he was,” Harrison says coldly. “I tolerated his affliction because I believed it could be cured. I arranged a marriage, provided a wife, gave him every opportunity to become normal. And how did he repay me? By carrying on a sordid affair behind my back. By humiliating our family in front of the entire world. By proving, beyond any shadow of doubt, that he is exactly the deviant I always feared he would become.”

“He’s not a deviant!” Logan moves around the table toward Gale, who is still pinned and bleeding and sobbing. “He’s just a man who loves another man. That’s not a crime. That’s not a sickness. That’s not something that needs to be cured!”

“In my house, it is.”

“Then your house is built on hatred and cruelty and-

4 CHAPTER 2 KAVENDER WIFE

“My house.” Harrison interrupts, his voice going deadly quiet, “is built on strength. On tradition. On the understanding that some things are natural and some things are not. The goddess made it be. Your feelings for my son are not natural, Mr. Reeves. They are a perversion. An abomination. And I will not stand by and watch them corrupt my bloodline any further.”

Logan’s hands are shaking, his whole body trembling with barely contained fury, but he doesn’t back down.

He stands over Gale’s hunched, bleeding form like a shield, like a guardian, like a man who would die

before he let any more harm come to the person he loves.

–

“You made him this way,” Logan says, and his voice is raw with emotion. “You. All of this – the violence,

the cruelty, the hatred – he learned it from you. He hurt Ember because you taught him that hurting people was the only way to feel powerful. He hid who he was because you made him believe that being himself was shameful. He is broken because you broke him, Harrison. Every terrible thing he’s done traces back to

you.”

I expect Harrison to argue. To defend himself. To lash out with more violence.

Instead, he smiles.

“Perhaps,” he says, and the admission is somehow more chilling than any denial would have been. Perhaps I did make him what he is. But that doesn’t change what needs to be done. Broken things must be discarded. Weaknesses must be cut away. My son has proven himself unworthy of the Crawford name, and I will deal with that failure as I see fit.”

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