TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 230

CHAPTER 166: AN EYE FOR AN EYÈ

EMBER’S POV

“I was protecting her from your wrath. I thought she’d come clean to me on her own and we could figure it out together-”

“Figure WHAT out?” His voice cracks upward, incredulous. “How to negotiate with a traitor? How to

manage the fallout politely? You knew about Nathaniel – you knew my own beta was working against me

– and you kept it to yourself.” He takes another step, and the hurt in his face is calcifying into something

colder. “Do you even realise how reckless and selfish that is?”

The words hit me harder than they should, because some part of me knows he’s right, and that part is the

part I’ve been trying to silence for weeks.

“I was NOT being selfish!” My voice comes out fiercer than I intend. “Selfishness would have been blowing everything up the second I found out. But I believed what you had with him, with them, was worth preserving that maybe they had a reason, an angle-”

“What fucking angle, Ember?” His hand slashes through the air. “That man has proved himself dangerous! You don’t sit on something like this and hope it resolves itself you don’t take things like that for granted!

“I wasn’t sure what it-”

“You were sure enough to interrogate me at the clinic about 2016. Sure enough to push and push until I snapped at you. But not sure enough to tell me that my own people were conspiring behind my back.” The laugh that comes out of him is the loneliest sound I have ever heard a human being make. “You knew, and you kept it from me. You who just screamed at me for keeping secrets.”

“Because every time I TRY to tell you anything, you shut me down!” The words tear out of me before I can shape them into anything measured. “You slam walls! You put your fist through plaster and look at me like I’m the enemy for daring to ask a question! I TRIED at the clinic, Knox! I tried to talk to you and you shouted me out of the room! So yes, I held back, because you have made it IMPOSSIBLE to be honest with you – because talking to you about hard things is like trying to hand a grenade to a man who’s already on fire!”

“I told you about 2016 just now

”

“Because RAFAEL forced your hand! Not because you trusted me! Because you were cornered and drunk and out of options, and that’s not honesty, Knox, that’s a hostage negotiation!”

The silence that follows has teeth, biting into every person in the room, holding on, refusing to let go.

Knox turns away from me, and the movement is deliberate, the way a door closes when someone has decided to stop fighting for it to stay open.

When he speaks again, the softness is gone from his voice

the wounded, reaching, desperate quality

Cal–Fellert ANTVE FOR ANAYE

replaced by something older and colder, and the change is so complete that for a moment he doesn’t even sound like the same person.

This is the Lycan King now, not my boyfriend, and the Lycan King’s attention has settled on Nathaniel with the focused calm of a predator that has finished with distractions and returned to its original prey.

The bone of contention.

“You told me no.”

The words are barely above a whisper.

Nathaniel, who has been standing against the far wall this entire time–motionless, expressionless,

watching his own world unravel with such careful stillness, not quite losing it yet.

“I stood in front of you.” Knox’s voice is conversational now, almost friendly. “I looked you in the eye – my beta, my brother, the man I built half my kingdom beside – and I asked you plainly, directly, with no room for misinterpretation: did you give those recordings to Logan.”

“Knox, again, you need to understand the context. This is beyond just-”

“And you said no.” Knox takes a step toward him. “You didn’t hesitate, you didn’t stutter, and your heartbeat didn’t even spike – I checked, because that’s what paranoid kings do, Nathaniel, they listen for the lie in the pulse. And there was nothing. All I received was your steady, faithful, brotherly heartbeat telling me exactly what I wanted to hear.” Another step, closing the distance between them with such patience. “How long did you practise that one? In the mirror? In the shower? Did you run it by Queenie first to make sure it landed right?”

“Everything I did was to protect-”

“You were protecting YOURSELF.” Knox’s voice still hasn’t risen, and that is what makes the room tremble

– the absolute control of it, the refusal to shout, the conversational ease of a man discussing logistics while his claws are extending, pushing through his fingertips with a soft sound that makes my heart pound. No, no, no. “The journal and the research and the containment protocols and whatever happened the night Celeste died that you don’t want me to remember. Ember was just the price you were willing to

୮ spend to keep your secrets buried.”

Queenie whimpers from across the room,

“Knox.” Nathaniel raises both hands, palms out. “Listen to me. What’s in that journal – the research, the documentation – you don’t have the full picture. If you’d let me explain-”

“Explain what? The dosages? The fucking protocols?” Knox’s smile is a horror – wide and warm and utterly devoid of anything resembling humanity. “The entry that says you administered something to me the night Celeste died? You had ten years to explain that. Ten years of standing beside me, eating at my table, sleeping under my roof. And you chose silence every single time.”

Nathaniel’s composure finally breaks for the first time, and under it I can see something I’ve never seen on his face before – genuine fear, perhaps not of Knox’s claws but of how much Knox knows, of how far the

unraveling has already gone, of what comes next in a conversation that has run past every contingency he planned for.

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