TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 155

CHAPTER 103: AGONIZING TERROR

KNOX’S POV

She’s burning up in my arms.

One second Ember is limp against my chest, unconscious but breathing, and the next her skin is on fire.

Actual fire, heat radiating off her so intense it nearly blisters my palms, and she’s writhing and twisting and making sounds that aren’t quite screams but close enough to make everything inside me go cold.

No. No no no no no.

“Ember.” I’m shaking her, cupping her face, pressing my forehead to hers even though it burns. “Ember, wake up. Open your eyes. Look at me. LOOK AT ME.”

She doesn’t respond. She just keeps burning, keeps writhing, keeps making those sounds that are ripping me apart from the inside out.

I’ve never been this scared in my entire fucking life.

I’ve stared down armies and killed men with my bare hands and walked through fire and blood and come out the other side without flinching.

But this

watching her burn and not knowing why, not knowing how to stop it, not knowing if she’s dying

right here in my arms this is terror.

Pure, paralyzing terror that locks my chest and steals/my breath and makes me feel like a child again,

helpless and small and completely unable to protect the one thing that matters.

Gale’s body is somewhere behind me, broken and bleeding in the snow where I left him after I swung him

into that tree until I heard his bones snap.

He’s not dead I made sure of that, because death would be too easy for him, too quick, too merciful for

a man who had his hands around her throat.

But right now I don’t give a fuck about Gale Crawford or his shattered ribs or the revenge I’ve been planning since the moment I saw him try to touch her.

Right now all I can see is Ember running out of that car.

The image is burned into my skull like a brand – her face when she saw the archers, the way she screamed my name, the way she ran toward me instead of away from danger like any sane person would

have done.

Something tightens in my chest.

And those arrows falling from the sky like silver rain, and me not fast enough, not close enough, watching her stand there exposed and vulnerable and so fucking SMALL against the death raining down on her.

Nothing else mattered in that moment.

< CHAPTER IH

ONIZING TERPOR

Hook those arrows

thousand.

every single one of them and I would do it again. A hundred times over. A

I would die on that hill as many times as it took, and I would call it a fair trade every single time.

I should have never brought her here.

I should have taken her back to the hotel and locked her in that suite and posted guards and kept her far away from this fight, from this blood, from the violence that follows me everywhere I go.

But I didn’t. I dragged her into my life, into my war, and now she’s burning alive in my arms and it’s my fault.

All of it is my fault.

“NATHANIEL!”

I don’t care who hears me. I don’t care about the battle still raging around us or the bodies piling up in the

snow.

I just need someone to tell me she’s going to be okay, need someone to fix this because I can’t. I can’t fix her and it’s killing me.

Nathaniel’s fighting. Still fighting with his signature swiftness.

Harrison’s men are regrouping faster than they should be, shifting into their wolf form in numbers, like they were expecting this, like the archers were just the first wave and now the real assault is starting.

Bodies everywhere my men, their men, blood turning the snow into red slush and guts steaming in the

frozen air.

And Harrison.

That old fucker is still standing on the ridge. Still watching. Still fucking waiting like he’s got front row

seats to a show he’s been planning for hours.

Another wave of arrows launches from the mountainside.

I hear them before I see them – that whistle, that death–song cutting through the air and I’m moving on instinct, screaming at Nathaniel to duck as I throw myself behind the car with Ember’s burning body pressed against mine.

The arrows slam into the spot where I was kneeling half a second ago, burying themselves so deep in the frozen ground that only the fletching shows.

It would have punched straight through us both. It would have ended everything.

Nathaniel rolls behind cover and crawls toward me with blood running down his face from a gash above

his eye.

“What’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t know.” My voice sounds wrong, too raw, too desperate. “She’s burning. Feel her.”

CHAPTER 30 AGONIZING TERROR

He presses the back of his hand to her forehead and yanks it back like he touched a stove.

“Fuck. That’s not possible.”

“I know it’s not fucking possible,” I’m holding her tighter, like that will help, like my arms can somehow fix whatever is happening inside her. “Get an ambulance. Helicopter. Something.”

“Already called. Ten minutes out.”

Ten minutes. Ten minutes is a lifetime when the woman in your arms might be dying.

Ember writhes again, her back arching off my chest, a moan escaping her lips that sounds like pain and something else, something I don’t understand.

And in the chaos and the blood and the fear, I catch a glimpse of her hands – her fingertips shifting, claws extending and retracting like her body can’t decide what it wants to be.

What the fuck is going on?

“We can’t move.” Nathaniel is checking his weapon, scanning the treeline where more shadows are gathering. “Harrison’s men have us pinned. The archers have the high ground. If we try to run for the vehicles–”

“Then we don’t run. We kill them all.”

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