TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 177

CHAPTER 127PQG IN A CAGF

CHAPTER 121: DOG IN A CAGE

EMBER’S POV

Sleep won’t come for me tonight.

Knox is warm beside me, one arm draped possessively across my waist, his breath slow and steady against my hair.

I should be content here in this strange industrial cocoon we’ve made for ourselves – tangled together on the narrow bed like we’re afraid to let go, like the universe might try to separate us again if we leave even an inch of space between our bodies.

His heartbeat thrums soft against my back. His scent wraps around me like a blanket woven from trust and safety.

But my mind is a hurricane that refuses to settle.

The clock on the wall reads 3:20 AM, its red digital numbers burning through the darkness.

January 2nd now – the first full day of a new year – and I’m lying here with my eyes wide open while my brain replays every word Nathaniel said.

The way he looked at me. Like I was a great evil. Like I was the very weapon fashioned to destroy his

alpha.

It made no sense. I would never do anything to doom or ruin Knox’s place as Lycan King.

Well–putting aside the fact that his life has been upturned in countless ways since we met.

But why did any of that even matter? The council gave us thirty days. After that, I’d be out of his hair.

My chest twists at the thought.

I don’t want to be out of his hair. I don’t want to be out of proximity from him. I don’t want to lose him.

But those are just my wants. And I keep wanting and wanting and wanting – what does he want? Me? Us? Or none of it at all?

Would he walk away the moment those thirty days expire, relieved to be free of the chaos I’ve dragged

into his life?

My mind drifts back to that dreadful dream.

That vision with Knox and his gold eyes – eyes so void of recognition, of warmth, of anything remotely

human.

The way his claws dripped with Rafael’s blood. The way he stepped over a body like it was nothing more than an inconvenient obstacle.

The way he walked toward me with that terrible hunger carved into his face, and then-

CHAPTER 121-90C IN A CAGE

Lsqueeze my eyes shut and force myself to breathe through the memory.

I wish Sapphire would just come back and tell me what it all meant.

Was it a prophecy? Some form of warning? A glimpse of what would happen if I stayed?

She said “if you don’t-” and got cut off before she could finish. There’s a way to prevent it. There has to be

a way to prevent it, because the alternative is unthinkable.

The alternative feels too close to the wounds Gale left behind.

A sound reaches me through the floor.

Faint at first, almost easy to dismiss as the building settling or pipes groaning in the cold.

But then it comes again – a desperate metallic rhythm.

Like something scraping against something else over and over in a pattern that speaks of panic and

determination in equal measure.

I go perfectly still, every sense straining toward that sound.

There it is again. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Coming from somewhere below us, somewhere in the industrial bowels of this converted warehouse that I haven’t yet explored.

The basement.

Where Gale is being kept.

The realization slides through me like ice water, and something dark and hungry stirs in my chest.

Something that’s been waiting for this moment, patient as a predator, ever since I woke up in this bed and learned that the man who tormented me for eight years was chained in a cage just floors below where I

slept.

I slip out from under Knox’s arm with the careful precision of a woman who’s spent years learning how to move without being noticed.

He shifts in his sleep, reaching instinctively for where my warmth was, and I tuck a pillow against his side before he can wake fully.

He settles with a soft sound, his brow smoothing, the tension that usually lives in his jaw finally released in

unconsciousness.

He looks younger when he’s sleeping. Softer. Almost peaceful in a way I’ve never seen him while awake. The Lycan King with his crown temporarily set aside, just a man exhausted by the weight of everything he

carries.

I pull on his shirt and pad barefoot toward the door without looking back.

The safehouse is a maze at this hour, emergency lights casting everything in a dim red glow that makes me feel like I’m walking through hell.

< CHAPTER 12 PROP IN A CAGE

follow the sound down a hallway I haven’t explored yet, past storage rooms filled with supplies and what

looks like a decommissioned security office, until I find a heavy metal door with stairs descending into absolute blackness.

The scraping is louder here. More frantic.

Every instinct screams at me to turn around. To wake Knox and let him handle whatever’s happening down there.

To let the Lycan King deal with the prisoner instead of the omega who has every reason to stay far, far away.

But there’s a pull I can’t resist. A force dragging me forward step by step, and my feet keep moving even as my brain screams at them to stop.

I descend the stairs into the dark.

The basement flickers to life when I find the light switch. Concrete floors, exposed pipes along the ceiling,

bare bulbs overhead.

The smell hits me first – blood, sweat, and the stench of a man who hasn’t bathed in days.

And there, in the center of this concrete hell, chained to a support beam inside what can only be

described as a dog cage, is Gale.

He doesn’t notice me at first.

He’s too consumed by his desperate project – scraping the chain links against the metal beam with a frantic, repetitive motion that speaks of a man who’s been at this for hours.

His movements are pathetic in a way that would almost be pitiable if I didn’t know exactly what kind of monster was wearing that broken body.

I take him in slowly, noting every detail with the clinical detachment of a woman examining a specimen

under glass.

My claw marks are still there – three deep gouges running from his hairline to his jaw. The wounds are angry and red, poorly healed, already showing the yellowish edges of infection.

His left eye is swollen shut, purple and black and weeping. His lip is split in two places. Bruises cover his bare chest and arms in varying stages of healing – Knox’s work, I assume.

Back at the dinner, I felt something almost like pity stirring in my chest.

Not for Gale himself, never for Gale himself, but for the boy he might have been before his father’s poison twisted him into this creature.

For the pathetic desperation in his eyes when Harrison stabbed him with the fork. For the way he flinched, the way he cowered, the way he looked so small under the cruelty of his father’s contempt.

I thought: maybe he was made into this. Maybe somewhere under all that cruelty, there’s a wounded child

CHAPTER 127000 IN A CAGE

who never had a chance.

And then he tried to kill me.

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