TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 221

CHAPTER 157: CALM BEFORE STORM

KNOX’S POV

The truth is that I saw Ember Aragon at a pack gathering in 2016 a territorial summit Gale dragged her to, a miserable event where she stood at his elbow in a dress that cost more than most people’s cars and smiled at people who didn’t see her and didn’t speak unless spoken to.

I watched her for an entire evening from across the room and wanted her with a violence that shocked

1. me.

The optics are murky.

The line between wanting her because I could save her and wanting her because I could take her was truly a matter of perspective. Not one I cared about at the time.

Optics didn’t matter when I’d always had my way.

I

Optics of a good and noble man imply conscience – both of which I severely lacked, and proved just right

when I drove a selfish bargain with her husband.

I wanted her the way I’d wanted things my entire life – totally, consumingly, with the absolute conviction that anything I desired should be mine to take.

I didn’t know about Gale. Not then.

She was his wife and she was beautiful and she was clearly unhappy, and rather than ask myself why – rather than look close enough to see the bruises under the makeup and the flinch responses she’d trained herself to hide – I saw an acquisition opportunity.

I sent Nathaniel with an offer that would have made Gale Crawford the richest Alpha in the northern

territories.

Bankrolled his pack. Cleared his debts. Funded his silly little whims and ambitions for the next decade.

All he had to do was share.

Weekends. Pack events. His wife in my bed on a schedule we’d agree upon like gentlemen, and in return, I’d make sure he never wanted for anything again.

I wanted her for my pleasure, on my terms, at my convenience – a woman I could unwrap on Friday and return by Sunday without the inconvenience of pretending it was anything other than what it was.

And I wanted her at the upcoming annual Summits too, on my arm, in my suite, a borrowed plaything for a king who didn’t see the difference between wanting a woman and buying one.

Gale refused.

And I had assumed it was pride. Alpha posturing. A man unwilling to share his mate with an asshole. that I understood the real reason.

It wasn’t until years later until Ember fell into my life on a plane

CHAPTER INT* ** 19 POUN STORM

Galc refused because proximity to me meant proximity to power, to resources, to someone who might actually listen if she asked for help.

Gale refused because tetting Ember near the Lycan King was the fastest way to expose himself and lose control of the woman he’d been systematically destroying for years.

And I never knew. Because I never looked past what I wanted long enough to see what she needed

That’s the thing that eats at me.

Not the deal itself – deals between powerful men are common, transactional, the machinery of our world.

It’s that I stood across a room from a woman who was being beaten and saw only something I wanted to

possess.

It’s that the man I am now, the man who would tear the world apart to protect her, was built on the bones

of the man who would have happily shared a bed with another Alpha’s abused wife on alternate weekends

and called it a fine arrangement.

One that meant I get to fuck her and still never commit.

And she can never know. That’s what I’ve told myself for the few weeks of knowing her.

She can never find out that the man she might be falling for once tried to negotiate access to her body the same way her father negotiated the sale of it.

Except now someone is talking. And that brings my mind back to who it could be.

Whose words do I trust – Rafael? The very bastard who thrives on setting everything around us ablaze?

Nathaniel wouldn’t tell Ember about 2016. We had an understanding.

She wasn’t prepared for that kind of truth – the kind that hits too close to old wounds and trauma. To old

patterns.

To the familiar horror of being a woman traded like cattle at the will of powerful men.

But that secret is walking. It has legs and it’s moving toward her, ticking like a bomb that confirms both my worst fears and the very thing I’ve been too scared to name since this arrangement started.

She would hate me.

She would leave.

She would be right to.

I close my eyes.

The cold gets worse. My body temperature drops in increments I can feel painful, then numb in a way that’s almost pleasant.

My wolf keeps the worst of it at bay, running hot under my skin.

first uncomfortable, then

Clas

I don’t move.

sit there, and I wait, and at some point the waiting becomes something else. Something heavier.

Something that pulls me down into the dark like a hand wrapped around my ankle, dragging me under.

I jerk awake perhaps a few hours later to cold and dark and the disorienting flatness of not knowing where I am for a solid three seconds.

Then I feel the wall at my back.

The stiffness in my joints and the throbbing in my hands and the realization that I fell asleep outside Ember’s door like a stray dog waiting to be let in.

It’s late. Deep–night late. I check my phone. 2:14 AM.

2 AM.

Nathaniel does his security patrol at 2 AM every single night. Same time. Same route. Has done for twenty

years without missing once. Which means right now, his cabin is empty.

I almost dismiss it.

This is parancid. This is me letting Rafael get the last laugh.

I almost push myself to my feet and go to my own cabin and pour a drink and let the night swallow this

whole miserable day.

But then I see it when I stand – the light in Nathaniel’s window going dark. The door opening.

A figure in black stepping out, breath fogging, moving toward the western perimeter with the efficient stride of a man who has walked this same pattern regardless of the location a thousand times.

He walks purposefully, and disappears into the tree line.

Rafael’s voice in my head: Look at what’s happening in your own house.

And Ember’s, from the clinic hallway: What happened in 2016?

And Nathaniel’s – from days ago, in a moment I didn’t think to question at the time–looking me dead in the eye and saying No when I asked if he leaked those recordings.

I think back to Ember in that kitchen with him, and the outburst of emotions I didn’t understand when I caught them. She looked… scared.

Phantom is very still.

Always the calm before the storm.

I cross to Nathaniel’s cabin.

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