TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 227

EMBER’S POV

Rafael’s smile doesn’t phase. “Oh, please. I made it too easy for you last night. You had your chance to kill me and you didn’t take it.” He tilts his head, something cold settling behind those grey eyes. “I don’t intend

to make it that easy next time.”

Knox lunges forward – fast, violent, closing the distance in two strides with his fist already cocked – but

Rafael only looks past Knox’s incoming fury, locks eyes with me, and says it.

“Tell her about 2016, Knox. If you’re so interested in forcing secrets into the open, then honour Rayana’s little therapy bullshit and give your woman what she wants. Tell her what you did, bastard. Show her what you really are.” He pauses, letting a wicked smile graze his lips. “If you trust your fucking schoolboy feelings for her, then give her the truth. Or should I?”

Knox stops mid–stride, his fist still raised, his whole body vibrating with the effort of not finishing what he started. Because Rafael just changed the game.

My breath has long since stopped. Oxygen is nonexistent. All that there is is the the pounding of my heart, the anguish of dancing on the edge of a cliff, a thin thread held far above ground. A thread Rfael is intent

on cutting.

Knox doesn’t move and doesn’t blink, but I can see the last thread snap – into the stillness of a man who has stopped fighting the fire and decided to walk into it himself, because at least that way he controls the

burn.

For the first time, he looks at me fully, and there is the mirroring of that anguish, that unbridled pain locked within those blue, blue eyes.

“Knox.” I step forward, pulse slamming against my ribs. “Stop. You’re drunk. Whatever this is – this isn’t

the place.”

He stares at me, really stares, and I hate the fear that takes my heart hostage. I’m not sure i want the truth

Γ

anymore.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I am.”

“Then sit down and let’s-”

“You want to know about 2016?”

My mouth closes and my hands go still at my sides.

“Don’t look so disappointed now. I know you do. You’ve been asking me since the clinic, and Rafael, our dear friend here, is so desperate to be the one to tell you that he’s practically vibrating with it. But I’d never give him that satisfaction.” He picks up the bottle, takes a long deliberate drink, and sets it down with the careful precision on a surface. “So fuck it. You want the truth? Fine. I’ll give you the fucking truth.”

“Knox, don’t do this when you’re-”

“I wanted to fuck you.”

The words detonate, and the room drains of every ounce of warmth and pretence and polite fiction, all sucked out in the vacuum those five words leave behind.

Queenie’s hand flies to her mouth, Rayana turns to stone mid–step, and Rafael is settled right in like his favorite show is on.

Knox doesn’t notice any of them because he’s looking at me, only at me, with the unflinching focus of a man confessing to a crime he knows will earn him a life sentence.

“That’s the truth. The real, ugly, graceless truth that nobody in this room has had the guts to say out loud.”

His laugh is a wound aimed at himself. “I saw you at a summit event in 2016, standing at Gale’s elbow in a dress you clearly hated, and you smiled at people who didn’t see you and didn’t speak unless someone spoke to you first. And I watched you the entire evening from across the room, and I didn’t think – she needs help. I didn’t think – that woman looks like she’s drowning.” He lets the pause hold, lets the room lean into it. “I thought I want her. In my bed. On my terms. As often as I can have her. I want to fuck her so bloody hard she’d beg to go right back to her husband.”

I can feel my chest caving in an actual physical sensation, the compression, the air thinning, the architecture of something I thought was solid collapsing floor by floor while I stand inside it.

But that isn’t so bad, is it? Fine, he’s a horny man.

But his next words follow with the same level of reckless abandon.

“So I sent Nathaniel to Gale with a deal that would have bankrolled his entire pack for the next decade cleared his debts, funded every pathetic political ambition the man ever nursed over his morning coffee and the price?” Knox’s smile is the ugliest thing I have ever seen on a face that beautiful. “Weekends. Events. His wife as my little broken toy and plaything on demand. It wouldn’t have mattered if you disagreed because you’d have been fully paid for. One cheque for one dutiful woman. I knew you’d kneel correctly. I knew you’d bow if I asked. I damn well knew you were too miserable to not want anything I

C offered. That’s what you were worth to me, Ember. The cost of doing business.”

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify