TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 220

CHAPTER 156:1 FCKED UP

KNOX’S POV

Nothing.

“I know you’re in there. I can hear you breathing.”

I press my palm flat against the wood. The surface is freezing cold and rough against my torn skin.

“I fucked up.” The words come out unsteady. Raw in a way that would humiliate me if I had any dignity left. “At the clinic. I know I fucked up. You asked me something simple – something you had every right to ask – and I threw a fucking tantrum and slammed a wall and I saw your face when I did it and I know what you were thinking. I know the look. I’ve seen it before, on you, directed at another man, and the fact that I

put it there is – fuck, Ember, the fact that I made you look at me like that-”

My voice breaks. I press my forehead against the door, right next to my bloody handprint, and close my

eyes.

“And I didn’t come after you. You walked into the woods in the freezing cold, spiraling and scared and I stayed at the clinic because going after you meant ripping myself open. It meant running through the snow and falling at your feet and letting you see every ugly, broken thing I’ve spent my life hiding behind walls and ice and a crown. And I wasn’t brave enough. So he found you first. Rafael. The man I want to kill with my bare hands found my girl sobbing in the snow because I wasn’t there. Because I’m never there when it counts. Because I always find a reason to stand still when I should be running toward you.”

I’m shaking. My whole body, and I wish it was from the cold. It comes from something deeper. Something that lives in the part of me I don’t let anyone touch/

Phantom is frantic. Pacing, snarling, throwing itself against my ribcage like it can break through bone and wood and the distance between us if it just tries hard enough.

The urge to shift is almost unbearable whether she wants it or not, to growl and snarl and bite until she understands that she is mine and I am hers and nothing else matters.

to tear this door off its hinges, to gather her against my chest

But I’ve spent my whole life taking choices away from women.

r

My father took them from my mother. I took them from Celeste in a thousand small ways I didn’t recognize until she was dead.

And I will not – I will fucking not be another man who breaks down Ember Aragon’s door because his need outweighs her no.

So I knock. And I talk. And I stay.

“I’m scared.” The admission costs me something I’ll never get back. “I’m scared of what happens when you find out the truth about me. Not the Knox you know not the one who brings you hot chocolate and fucks

you stupid and makes promises he doesn’t know how to keep. The one before that. The one who did

things I’m not proud of. Things I never planned on telling you because I knew – I knew how you’d look at

me.”

I swallow hard.

“The way you might be looking at me right now, through this door, and I can’t even see it, and that’s somehow worse.”

Silence. But I can hear her breathing change. She’s listening. Whether she wants to or not, she’s listening.

“I don’t know how to be what you need. I know that. I’ve known it since the day you landed on my plane with those terrified eyes and that spine made of fucking steel, and I thought I thought, this woman is going to ruin me. And I wanted it. I wanted you to ruin me, Ember, because nothing in my life before you was worth a damn thing anyway.”

I press my hand harder against the door. Like I can reach through the wood and find her hand on the other

side.

“I wanted you before I knew you. And now I know you and it’s so much worse because you’re — you’re

everything. You’re everything I can’t have and don’t deserve and can’t stop reaching for. And every time I reach, I fuck it up. Every single time. Because I don’t know how to do this without destroying it.”

I stop talking. Not because I’ve run out of words – there are more, so many more, an ocean of them pressing against my teeth – but because the ones I need to say are the ones I can’t.

Not yet. Not through a door. Not when she won’t look at me while I say them.

Three words. Sitting right there. And I’m too much of a coward to let them out.

“I’m not leaving,” I tell the door instead. “I’ll be right here. Whenever you’re ready. If you’re ever ready. I’ll be

right here.”

I sink down against the wall beside her door.

The cold through the bottom crevice of the cabin door seep through my clothes immediately, biting into muscle and bone, and I welcome it.

It gives me something to focus on besides the ache spreading through any chest like poison.

I sit there for a long time.

The compound goes dead–quiet around me. Lights extinguish in the lodge.

The sounds of Queenie patching up Rafael with light chatter with Rayana fades, but no one else returns to

the girls‘ cabin.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify