TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 229

CHAPTER 165: THE RECORDING

EMBER’S POV

“Ember.” Queenie’s voice fractures. “I don’t I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You don’t?” I tilt my head and study her, the way her hands have started shaking, the way her eyes dart to Nathaniel before she can stop herself – the tell she’s never been able to control, the involuntary reflex of a woman who checks with her husband before deciding how to feel. “Really, Queenie? Because your face is doing that thing it does. That thing where you look to Nathaniel for permission before you decide what you’re allowed to say.”

“That’s not – I’m not—”

“The nervous energy all trip. The way you can’t hold my eyes for longer than three seconds. The way you

flinch every single time someone mentions the council trial.” I’m walking toward her now, slowly, and she’s

backing up, and there is something happening in my chest that is very calm and very cold and very, very

finished with being careful. “I have been watching you for weeks, Queenie. Cataloguing every twitch, every guilty look, every time you opened your mouth to say something and Nathaniel shut you down with a

glance.”

“Ember, please, I swear I don’t know what-”

“The RECORDING, Queenie.”

She stops, and everything stops with her – her breathing, her hands, the lie she was halfway through building, all of it frozen in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

“The recording that was played at the council hearing.” My voice has gone quiet now, quiet and clear and steady, and the steadiness is what makes it dangerous. “The one that almost sent me back to Gale. The one that almost got me gift–wrapped and delivered to a man who broke my ribs and my jaw and told me 1 was crazy and would have eventually killed me.” I hold her gaze and I have never been more still in my life. “That was you. Yes or no.”

“It’s – Ember, it’s not that simple, there were things happening that you don’t-”

r

“YES. OR. NO.”

“You don’t understand what was at stake, there were reasons-”

“I am going to ask you one more time. And then I am going to stop asking.”

The break is total when it comes, a complete structural collapse of a woman who has been holding something up for too long and whose muscles have finally, catastrophically given out.

Her knees buckle and her hands fly to her face and the sound that tears out of her is past crying, past shameless sobbing, something wrenched from the bottom of her chest that has no language and no

shape.

“Yes.” She gasps it out between sobs that wrack her whole body. “Yes. Nathaniel told me to – Logan was digging for something worse, something that would have destroyed Knox completely, and we thought if we gave him something smaller he’d stop-”

“You thought you’d give him me.” I nod slowly, and I can feel my face smile, a baring of teeth that comes from somewhere I didn’t know I had access to. “You did the math and decided I was the acceptable loss. Send Ember back to her abuser she’s survived it before, she’ll survive it again, and anyway she’s been traded her whole life, what’s one more transaction between friends?”

“That’s not what – we didn’t think it would go that far, we never imagined – Oh, goddess. I’m sorry.” Queenie is destroyed, mascara reaking down her face, nose running. “I’m so sorry, Ember, I’ve wanted to tell you every single day, I’ve been dying inside-”

“You’ve been dying inside.” I nod slowly. “You’ve been dying insider While I was the one who was almost actually dying. While the council was debating whether to ship me back to the man who put me in a

hospital three times. You were dying inside. That must have been really hard for you, Queenie.”

The cruelty in my own voice should frighten me. It doesn’t.

“I’m so sorry. Please, believe me. I have regretted it everyday.” She collapses further on her knees.

“Was any of it real?” The question comes out soft. “The friendship. The heart to heart. Holding my hand during the trial when I couldn’t stop shaking. The way you cried when I cried and laughed when I laughed and made me believe, for the first time in years, that I had someone in my corner who wasn’t there because of Knox or some angle I couldn’t see.” I pause, ‘Was any of that real, Queenie? Or were you just following Nathaniels’s instructions? Get close enough to her to get ride of her?”

She can’t answer because she’s past words now, just shaking and sobbing and coming apart at the seams, and the part of me that has spent a lifetime running toward broken people is screaming at me to go to her, to hold her, to fix it, to make it okay the way I always do.

I stay exactly where I am.

Knox’s eyes are darting around the room – from Queenie’s sobbing face to Nathaniel’s rigid posture to me and back again – and I can see it happening in real time, the terrible arithmetic of a man realising that every single person in his orbit has been lying to him.

Come The confusion comes first, raw and disoriented, and when he turns to me, what I see is a man who has

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