TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 231

CHAPTER 167: THE PROBLEM WITH FEELING

EMBER’S POV

The movement is so fast it barely registers as motion in a blink, his hand crossed the space between them in a devastating arc that splits Nathaniel’s skin from temple to jaw in three deep parallel gouges, ripping out an eye with no remorse.

Blood sprays across the wall in a bright fan, spattering the wood panelling in a pattern that will never fully

come out, and before Nathaniel can even stagger Knox follows through with a downward slash that

catches his shirt at the collar and rips it apart to the navel, fabric and skin splitting together, the chest

under opening in three long shallow lines that bloom red and raw from collarbone to stomach.

Queenie screams, and my own heart stops.

Nathaniel hits the wall and slides, catching himself with one hand pressed to his ruined face and the other to his torn chest, blood coursing through his fingers from both wounds.

Finally, the mask is gone – the composure, the blankness, the professional act he’s worn for as long as I’ve known him – all of it stripped away, and what’s left is a man who played a long game and lost, who is finally as naked and bleeding and exposed as the rest of us.

Queenie throws herself between them, her small body a shield, her hands spread wide against Knox’s chest as if she can hold back a Lycan King with the sheer force of love and desperation.

“GET OUT.” Knox’s voice comes from somewhere subterranean, dark and crushing, and his eyes are flashing between blue and gold as his wolf presses against his skin hard enough that the air around him spikes. “Both of you. Right now. While I can still choose not to finish this.”

“Knox, please-” Queenie is sobbing against his chest, her hands fisted in his shirt, her face a blur of tears and mascara. “Please, he was trying to protect you, we both were, everything we did-”

“NOW.”

The word hits the room like a shockwave, and Queenie’s knees buckle under the force of it.

She catches herself, turns, and wraps her arms around Nathaniel – pulling his weight over her shoulder, half–carrying him because his legs aren’t cooperating and the blood is making everything slippery.

He’s leaving a trail across the hardwood – face and chest dripping with a single eye socket pooling a

thread of blood.

She’s whispering to him in fragments I can’t hear and don’t want to, her hands pressing against his wounds, trying to hold him together the way she couldn’t hold anything else together today.

The door opens, and cold air floods in, and they disappear into the white.

The door closes behind them. And then there are four of us.

The room is a disaster. Blood on the wall. Burned cookies untouched on the table. Rayana’s letters unwritten, her confession undelivered.

The wreckage of friendships and loyalties and a decade of trust scattered in one morning.

Knox stands in the center of it, chest heaving, claws still extended, whiskey bottle somehow still in his

other hand. He looks at the blood on his fingers.

Then at me.

“Well,” he says, and his voice is hoarse, raw, stripped of everything except a bitterness so complete it

could poison groundwater. “Now you know. The whole beautiful picture. Your boyfriend tried to buy you

like cattle. Your best friend sold you to your abuser. And the man who was supposed to protect both of us has been running a ten–year science experiment from the room next door.” He takes a drink. “Welcome to my life, Ember. Still glad you chose me?”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“That.” I point at the bottle, at his bleeding hand, at the smirk that’s trying to form on his mouth and not quite making it. “The self–destruction routine. The ‘I’m such a monster‘ performance. You don’t get to confess and then play victim in the same breath.”

“I’m not playing-”

“You ARE. You’re doing it right now. Drinking and bleeding and making yourself the tragic hero of your own story so you don’t have to sit with the fact that you HURT me. Not Nathaniel. Not Queenie. Not Rafael.

YOU.”

He flinches.

“You negotiated for access to my body with a man who was DESTROYING me. And then when I fell into your lap by accident, you let me believe it was fate. You let me think we were some kind of love ston when really I was just… a long–term acquisition that finally went through.”

“For fuck’s sake, that’s not all it is.” His voice is rough, almost pleading. “Ember, you know that’s not all it is. What I feel for you – what I’ve FELT for you-”

“What you feel for me is the problem, Knox!” My voice breaks for the first time, and I hate it, hate the crack that lets the pain through when I need the ice to hold. “Because I feel it too! I feel it so much it’s been eating me alive! But how am I supposed to trust it now? How am I supposed to know if what’s between us is real or just the natural endpoint of a transaction you started years ago? How do I know you’re not just finishing the deal?”

“Because the deal was for weekends.” His voice is barely above a whisper. “And what I want is every single day of your life. Because the deal was about possession. And what I feel is the opposite of that – it’s terror. Absolute, paralyzing terror that you’ll see me clearly and run.”

Then why didn’t you TELL me?”

“Because I’m a coward!” The word rips out of him. “Because I’m a fucking coward who would rather swallow glass than tell the truth when it matters! Because every tirne I open my mouth to give you something real, something honest, something that might actually let you in – I hear my father’s voice and

I see Celeste all over again and I see my mother and I know what happens the moment you hand

someone the power to destroy you, they WILL!”

He’s shaking. The bottle trembles in his grip.

“And he was right,” Knox continues, something broken running through his voice. “He was right, because I’ve just handed you every piece of ammunition you could ever want, and you’re going to use it. You’re going to walk away. Just like Celeste. Just like Rayana. Just like everyone does when they see what’s actually under all this.”

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