TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 223

CHAPTER 159: WAKEY, WAKEY

EMBER’S POV

“Wakey Wakey, sunshine.”

The voice cuts through my sleep, bright and shrill and entirely too alive for whatever ungodly hour this is.

“I said wakey wakey. Rise and shine. Up and at ‘em. Carpe diem. Seize the-”

“Rayana.” My voice comes out like gravel dragged across sandpaper. “What are you doing.”

“I’m waking you up. Obviously. Now – breakfast. I have options. Eggs Benedict with smoked salmon and

capers, or a traditional Finnish porridge with lingonberry compote, or – and this is my personal

recommendation – pain au chocolat that Rafael’s chef makes fresh every morning and which I have been

reliably informed will change your entire relationship with pastry as a concept.”

I pry one eye open.

Rayana is standing in my doorway, fully dressed, fully made up, radiating the specific manic energy of a woman who has decided that today will go according to plan by all means.

She’s wearing cream cashmere and her platinum hair is swept into something elegant and she looks, by all accounts, like a woman who was NOT hospitalized yesterday for a medical emergency.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in a clinic bed?” I manage.

Rayana scoffs. Actually scoffs, like I’ve suggested something under her dignity.

“As if a flimsy backcountry clinic could hold me down. Please. I’ve walked out of better hospitals than that.” She steps into my room, heels clicking against the hardwood. “I’m absolutely fine. Better than fine. I’m rejuvenated.”

She does a little spin to prove her point.

And winces.

Γ

It’s fast – a flicker across her face, there and gone, smoothed over with the practiced ease of someone who has spent months dismissing her pain.

But I see it. The way her hand grazes her side. The way her weight shifts unevenly for half a second before

she corrects.

“Are you fine?” I ask slowly. “Actually fine?”

Rayana’s smile tightens. “Since when do you care?”

The question stings more than it should, mostly because there’s genuine curiosity under the bite.

Like she honestly doesn’t know the answer. Like no one has asked in a while.

“Since yesterday,” I say. “When you collapsed and scared the hell out of everyone.”

& CHACHATRYWARTY WALLY

Something flickers in her expressión surprise, maybe, or something softer she doesn’t want me to see.

Then she rolls her eyes and waves a hand.

“Now is not the time for your little detective hat. We have things to do.” She checks her phone. “I’ve called a gathering. The lodge. Twenty minutes. I have something important to share with everyone, and I need you presentable.”

“A gathering? What kind of-”

“Twenty minutes, Ember. Shower. Clothes. Something warm. Go.”

She sweeps out of my room before I can argue, leaving behind a trail of expensive perfume and the lingering sense that I have been managed by a professional.

I sit up in bed, my brain still struggling to catch up with the rest of me, and that’s when everything from last

night crashes back in.

Knox at the door.

His voice through the wood, how broken they were, how raw and confused and honest, nothing thing like the man who slammed walls and growled orders and shut me down at the clinic.

A different Knox. One I’ve never heard before, peeled back to something under the armor that scared me more than the anger ever did.

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

I hadn’t opened the door.

I’d sat on the floor with my back against it and my hand pressed flat to the wood and listened to him fall apart on the other side, and every word he said carved a new line into whatever’s left of my self–control.

And I still didn’t open it.

Because opening that door meant falling into his arms. And falling into his arms meant losing every rational thought I’d been clinging to since dawn – because that’s what Knox does to me.

That’s the intoxicating, terrifying thing about him. One look into those blue eyes and my resolve dissolves. One touch and I’d sweep everything under the rug – the 2016 deal, Nathaniel’s whispers, Queenie’s betrayal, all of it – just to feel him close.

I’d let him hold me and tell me it was going to be okay and I’d believe him because I always believe him, because my body trusts him even when my mind is screaming to slow down and think.

And I needed to think. I needed to know.

I needed to decide what comes next for me without his hands on my skin turning my brain to static and my heart into something stupid and willing.

So I pressed my hand against the wood and I listened to him break on the other side and i hated myself

CHAPTER 1OWANEY WANY

for every second of it.

At some point he’d gone quiet. At some point, I had wondered if he had given up altogether.

I drag myself toward the bathroom, grabbing a towel from the rack, and pause.

“Rayana.”

She’s still in the main area, I can hear her doing something in the kitchen.

“Was there…” I swallow. “Was there anyone by my door this morning? When you came in?”

The clattering pauses.

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