TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 233

CHAPTER 168: THE END OF US–2

“At least let things settle for a day. Let everyone calm–”

“There is no calming down from this, Rayana. It’s now or I’m never taking you. Decide.”

The ultimatum hangs in the air.

And I watch Rayana’s face cycle through a dozen emotions in the span of three seconds – horror at what she’s witnessed, guilt at her role in engineering this trip, grief for so much, and underneath all of it, the desperate, clawing need of a dying woman who wants to see her mother’s grave before her body gives

out.

She stands. Slowly. Her hands shaking.

“I’m sorry,” she says, looking at me. And there’s something genuine in it, something stripped of any malicious intent. “Ember. I’m sorry. I didn’t want this. Whatever you think of me, I didn’t-”

“Congratulations,” I say, and my voice comes out strange and hollow. “You got your Switzerland trip. I hope

it’s worth it.”

Rayana’s face crumbles. For one second she looks like she might actually cry.

But she pulls herself together, draws her spine straight, and follows Knox toward the door.

Knox pauses at the threshold. His back to me. His hand on the frame.

I wait for him to turn around. Wait for him to say something – anything – that might crack his resolve, that might let me see the man underneath one more time.

He doesn’t turn around.

The door opens, and the cold rushes in. The door closes.

I walk to the window.

Outside, Knox is crossing the snow toward one of Rafael’s private helicopter pads with Rayana struggling to keep up behind him.

He’s already on the phone calling the pilot, arranging the flight, no doubt.

–

A few minutes later, the helicopter starts. The blades spin. The snow kicks up in great white clouds that obscure everything for a moment, and when it clears, they’re lifting off.

He doesn’t look back.

Not once.

I watch the helicopter rise into the pale arctic sky until it’s a black dot against the clouds, then a memory, then nothing.

A hand settles on my shoulder.

“Come inside,” Rafael says softly. “Away from the window. It’s cold.”

I don’t answer him. I turn and run.

Through the lodge door, down the steps, into the cold that hits my face and my chest and my bare arms,

and I don’t feel any of it because there is something so much worse happening inside me that the weather

is irrelevant.

—

The snow is deep and my boots aren’t laced and I don’t care I just need to be outside, I need air, I need

space, I need to scream into something bigger than that room.

“KNOX!”

His name rips out of me before I can stop it, raw and desperate and so loud it echoes off the mountains

and comes back empty.

The helicopter pad is bare. The sky is bare. The compound is bare..

“KNOX!”

Nothing answers. Nothing comes back.

He is gone and the world is enormous and I am standing in the middle of it with my arms wrapped around myself and my knees buckling and the tears coming all at once every single one I refused to shed inside that room pouring out of me now in ugly, gasping waves that go beyond anguish to be classified.

I sink into the snow and I have never in my life felt this alone.

Not when Gale locked the bedroom door. Not when my mother told me to die in my bed. Not when the

doctor said the baby was gone.

Those were loneliness with walls around them – contained, survivable, the kind you learn to carry. This is

open air.

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