TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 166

CHAPTER 111: YOU CAN BREATHE

EMBER’S POV

(PRESENT)

The sound rips out of me before I’m fully conscious, raw and animalistic and absolutely terrified.

The room is wrong, unfamiliar walls, unfamiliar ceiling, unfamiliar everything, and for one horrible moment I don’t know where I am or how I got here.

My hands fly to my chest expecting to find torn flesh, expecting to find the wound that killed me, but there’s nothing there.

There is just skin. Just my heart trying to pound its way out of my fibcage.

The door explodes inward.

Knox.

He’s across the threshold before the door finishes slamming against the wall, his eyes wild, his body coiled for violence.

He scans every corner of the room in the space of a heartbeat, searching for threats, for enemies, for whoever made me scream like that.

When he finds nothing – when he realizes I’m alone, that there’s no one to fight, no one to destroy – his expression shifts into something almost worse.

“I’ve got you.” He’s pulling me into his arms before can speak, crushing me against his chest so hard it

steals what little breath I have left. “I’ve got you. You’re safe. You’re safe.”

I’m shaking.

Trembling against him so hard my teeth are chattering, the nightmare still so vivid I can taste blood in my mouth, can feel phantom claws tearing through my flesh.

r

His claws. His hands. The empty look in his eyes as he-

“I’m here, baby.” His voice drops lower, softer, one hand cradling the back of my head while the other strokes down my spine. “It’s all over now. You can breathe. Just breathe for me.”

And even though some part of me is still screaming that this is the man who just killed me, who just tore me open from collarbone to hip, I can feel my body responding to his presence despite itself.

There’s an unwanted ease spreading through my chest, a quieting of the panic that has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with the way his scent fills my lungs.

The noise in my head softens.

Sapphire’s presence lingers at the edge of my consciousness, watchful, but even she seems to settle as

S CHAPTER 1 TAN BREATHT

Knox holds me tighter.

And slowly, reality begins to catch up.

We’re not on that mountain anymore. There’s no snow under my feet, no blood in the air. Knox is here. Knox is alive.

Which means the arrows didn’t kill him, the poison didn’t kill him, we both survived something that should have destroyed us.

I’m in a bed. In a room I don’t recognize. And Knox is holding me like I’m the only thing in the world that matters.

His arms are solid around me, his heartbeat thundering against my cheek, and slowly so slowly – the terror begins to recede.

I pull back from his chest and fire a glare at him.

“Don’t ever do that again.”

The words scrape out of me rough and desperate, a new terror resurfacing.

“Don’t ever leave me like that, Knox. You were dead. I thought… I thought you were dead in my arms on that mountain and you weren’t breathing and there was so much blood and I couldn’t-” My voice breaks, splinters, threatens to shatter completely. “I couldn’t save you. I couldn’t do anything. You just kept bleeding and I couldn’t make it stop.”

He pulls me back against his chest, tighter than before, impossibly tight, and I feel him press his face into my hair, feel the shudder that runs through his body at my words.

When he speaks, his voice is rough in a way I’ve never heard before, scraped raw, stripped of every

defense.

“I’m sorry.” The words come out quietly. “I’m so sorry, Ember. I didn’t think-” He pulls back just enough to cup my face in his hands, tilting it up until I’m looking at him, and his eyes are gold around the edges, his wolf pressing against his skin. “I can’t lose you. Do you understand that? I can’t. It would-”

Γ

He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t have to. I can see everything he’s not saying written across his face, can feel it in the way his hands tremble against my cheeks.

“I thought I lost you too,” he whispers, and his voice breaks on the last word, just barely, just enough for me to hear the terrified man under all that kingly composure. “When you were burning in my arms and I didn’t know why, when you almost stopped breathing and I couldn’t-”

I kiss him.

It’s not graceful or romantic, it’s desperate and messy and tastes like salt from tears I didn’t realize I was

crying.

But his hands fist in my hair and he kisses me back like I’m oxygen and he’s been drowning, and for a long

(CHAPTER YOUCAN BREATHE

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify