TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 219

X CMWELTIRILAAN FRONT ZURICH

CHAPTER 155: A BOY FROM ZURICH

KNOX’S POV

The nurse retreats with a look that promises incident reports and formal complaints.

Rayana ignores her completely and fixes me with a stare that I have not been on the receiving end of in ten years but recognize immediately.

The look that says: I know you. I know what you’re about to do. And I’m not letting you.

“I saw what happened. Go,” she says. “Go get her. Remember what we talked about.”

What we talked about.

The aurora night floods back. The hour she stole from me under those lights while Ember sat in a cabin wondering why I didn’t come back.

I’d braced myself for the usual Rayana bullshit.

The dress accidentally slipping off one shoulder. The tragic sighs. The whole

dying–woman–who–just–wants–one–last–taste–of–what–she–lost routine, calibrated to make me feel like an

asshole for saying no.

But Rayana didn’t do any of that.

She sat across from me in a wingback chair with a blanket pulled to her chin and she talked about my

father.

Nobody talks about my father.

Nobody who values their continued existence brings up Alexei Volkov in my presence.

It’s an unwritten law of the werewolf world – the Lycan King’s childhood is off–limits, a locked room that even the most reckless gossips know better than to open.

But the curse of having Rayana as my first anything real is that she existed before the walis went up. Before I learned to bury the things that made me vulnerable, before I perfected the ice and the distance and the performance of a man who doesn’t need anyone.

She knew the version of me that went dead still when a room got too quiet – because I grew up in a house where silence meant my father’s eyes were about to change colour and the devil trapped in his

veins comes alive.

The version that trusted a fist more than a kiss, because at least a fist had the decency to be honest about

what it was. A kiss was worse.

A kiss meant my father was back to his gentle, apologetic self, weeping and sobbing over my blood like it wasn’t his hands that drew it.

But even then, I knew every ounce of that sweetness was just the intermission.

The softer he got, the more tender and sorry and sweet–fucking–loving he became, the closer the next episode crept. My next execution. My mother’s too.

Rayana knew things about me that were still raw back then, still bleeding

things I’ve since killed and

cremated and scattered so thoroughly that even Celeste, even with the mate bond singing between us, never got close to them.

Things the bond itself couldn’t drag out of me because I’d already cut thern out by the time she came along. Things I couldn’t give no matter how much Celeste begged or fought or wept for them.

Rayana knew them because she was there before the surgery.

So she kicked the door down.

She talked about what it does to a boy to grow up under a man like Alexei. What it teaches him about love

– that love is what got his mother killed, that tenderness is the thing that makes you drop your guard long

enough to be destroyed, that the only safe way to survive a man like my father was to stop feeling

anything at all.

And then she talked about what I built on top of that wreckage. The patterns.

The way I consume the women in my life and call it devotion because the alternative is admitting that i don’t know how to love without controlling, don’t know how to want without acquiring, don’t know how to hold something precious without crushing it in my grip.

She talked about Ember. About how I’m doing to her exactly what I did to Celeste – offering everything except the one thing that matters, keeping her close enough to need me but never close enough to actually know me.

She said Ember deserved to know who I really am. Not the king. Not the protector.

The boy from Zürich who learned that wanting someone meant owning them because the alternative — actually loving someone, actually needing them – was what killed his mother.

And I had left that conversation furious.

White–hot, teeth–grinding furious, because Rayana had reached into the place I keep locked and pulled out things I’ve spent my entire adult life burying.

And instead of going to Ember’s cabin, instead of letting that rawness drive me toward the one person who might have actually helped – I went to my own cabin and sat in the dark and told myself i was

protecting her from my mood.

Protecting her. My favorite lie.

The one I tell myself every time I choose distance over honesty, every time I retreat behind my walls instead of letting someone see what’s on the other side.

Rayana is looking at me now with that same expression. The one that says she can see through every layer of bullshit I’ve built and she’s not impressed with any of it.

“Go,” she repeats, softer this time. Then she turns to Queenie, who has been standing frozen on the pathway this entire time, horrified, shaking. “Queenie. Help me get Rafael inside. There’s a first aid kit in the lodge.”

Queenie moves. She bends down to help Rafael to his feet, and he leans on her heavily, wincing, playing up the injuries just enough to milk sympathy.

Asshole.

I cross the distance to her cabin faster than I should. Practically running by the end, my shoes punching through the crust of ice on the snow, my breath fogging in the dark.

The girls‘ cabin is dead quiet when I let myself in, and her scent hits me like a drug the second I cross the threshold – pulling me down the hall, past the empty rooms, to the last door at the end.

I knock.

The sound is too loud in the silence. The kind of drop–dead silence that has never meant anything good in my life – always the quiet before the worst of it.

My knuckles leave bloody prints on the wood – Rafael’s blood, mine, it doesn’t matter anymore.

Nothing.

I knock harder.

“Ember.”

The silence on the other side of that door is a living thing.

I can feel it pressing back against me, a wall she’s built with her body and her will and every ounce of exhaustion I watched drain the life from her face as she walked away from me.

I knock again. And again. And my hands are bruising now on top of the splits, the knuckles swelling and screaming, and I don’t care.

I don’t care if I break every bone in my hands on this door. I’ll knock until the wood gives or my body does,

whichever comes first.

“Ember, please. Open the door.”

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