TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 178

CHAPTER 122: I’M SORRY, BABY

EMBER’S POV

The memory rises sharp and ugly.

How easily he dragged me across the snow. How hell–bent he was on keeping those hands wrapped around my throat until he choked the last breath out of me.

He didn’t hesitate. Didn’t show even a flicker of the remorse he’d performed so convincingly for Harrison’s audience.

The moment he had the chance, he tried to end me.

Any pity I might have felt dies a quiet death in my chest, replaced by something colder. Something hungrier. Something that tastes like revenge.

“Trying to escape?”

My voice echoes off the concrete walls, and Gale’s head snaps up so fast I hear his neck crack.

The scraping stops. His one functioning eye finds me in the dim light, and I watch with deep, visceral

satisfaction as fear ripples across what’s left of his face.

Good.

“Ember.” His voice comes out as a rasp, damaged and desperate. He clears his throat, tries again with that familiar oily smoothness. “Ember, thank the goddess you’re here. Please, you have to help me-”

“Do I?”

I walk closer with steps that are deliberately slow, deliberately unhurried, my bare feet silent on the cold

concrete.

I’m in no rush. We have all the time in the world, and he’s not going anywhere.

“Please.” He’s pressing against the bars of his cage now, one hand reaching through the gaps toward me while the other stays chained to the beam behind him, giving him barely any range of motion. A dog begging for scraps. “I know I hurt you. Last night was… it was a–an episode. I know I was… I was sick, Ember. I was so sick and I didn’t get help and I took it out on you and I’m so, so sorry for everything-

“Are you?”

I tilt my head, studying him like he’s an insect pinned to a board.

Like he’s something small and squirming that I might choose to crush or might choose to release, depending entirely on my mood.

“Yes!” The tears come now, sliding down the ruined landscape of his face, and I have to admire his commitment to the performance. He was always good at this part. “I’m so sorry. For the hitting, for the- the things I said, for the way I made you feel small and worthless. I was a monster. I know that now. But I

<CHAPTER LTM SORRY BAPY

ean change. I can get help. Please, just… let me out. Let me go somewhere far away where I’ll never bother

you again. You’ll never have to see my face. You can forget I ever existed-

He’s very good at this.

#

The pleading. The tears. The trembling voice and the desperate eyes and the performance of remorse so convincing it could win awards.

He did this every single time, didn’t he? At least at the beginning, when his conscience still mattered and I was his newly wed victim.

He’d come to me after every beating that left me bleeding on the bathroom floor. After every broken bone and split lip and night spent wondering if I would survive until morning.

He’d come to me with exactly this expression – tears streaming, yoice cracking, promises falling from his lips like rain.

I’m so sorry, baby. It’ll never happen again. I don’t know what came over me. I love you so much. Please forgive me.‘

And I believed him.

Every. Single. Time.

“Please, Ember.” His voice breaks beautifully on my name, a masterwork of manufactured vulnerability. “I

know I don’t deserve your mercy. But I’m begging you. As the mother of-”

“Don’t.”

The word comes out sharp as a blade, and he actually flinches back from it.

“Don’t you dare.” I’m closer now, close enough to smell the infection rotting in his wounds, close enough to see the yellowish discharge seeping from under the scabs on his face. “Don’t you dare mention my baby. You don’t get to invoke that memory to save yourself, you fucking bastard.”

“I didn’t mean to-”

“You knew exactly what you were doing.” I crouch down so we’re eye level, close enough to reach through the bars and rip his face open if I wanted. A smile tugs at my lips – the kind that would have terrified me once. “You wanted to kill that baby. You hated me so much that the mere thought of our child repulsed you.” I tilt my head, watching him flinch. “Because goddess forbid anything tether you to the woman who ruined your life, right?”

The silence stretches between us, and I watch the mask start to slip.

The faux remorse crumbling at the edges, revealing the rage and resentment that always lived under Gale’s ugly face.

His jaw tightens. His remaining eye hardens. The hand that was reaching toward me in supplication slowly

curls into a fist around the bars.

& CHAPTER 12/YM SORRY PARY

“Bitch” he starts, his voice shaking with fury.

“But maybe,” I cut him off, my tone turning cherry–sweet, “I could forgive you. Maybe I could make this all end once and for all. Give you the chance to start over somewhere else, just as I have.”

There’s a key hanging on a hook by the stairs.

I noticed it the moment I came in – probably the key to his cage, left there by whoever was supposed to be guarding him. Careless. Or maybe intentional.

I rise to my feet and walk over to retrieve it.

The sound Gale makes when he sees what I’m doing is almost enough to make me laugh – a wet, desperate gasp of hope that transforms his whole ruined face.

His eye goes wide, filling with tears again, his body pressing against the bars with renewed urgency.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify