TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 234

CHAPTER 169: DO YOU HATE ME?

EMBER’S POV

“I hate to say it, but I told you so,” Rafael says softly. “He is gone, and he is never coming back.”

I don’t move.

My knees are in the snow and my hands are numb and the tears have frozen to tracks on my cheeks, and I am so far past the point of responding to Rafael Montenegro that he might as well be speaking to the

mountains.

He crouches beside me.

The warmth of his body engulfs mine even through the cold, and hate that – hate that he’s warm and alive and HERE when the person who should be here is thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic heading toward a country with a woman who knew him before I existed.

“You’re going to get hypothermia.” His voice is reasonable, though tentative. “Come inside. I’ll make you something warm.”

I stare at the empty helicopter pad. The wind has already started filling in the tracks Knox left in the snow. In an hour, there’ll be no evidence he was ever here at all.

“Ember.” His hand settles on my shoulder. “You can hate me tomorrow, I promise. Right now you need to come inside before your body shuts down.”

I stare through him. Through his hand, through his concern, through every carefully arranged molecule of

Rafael Montenegro.

He’s speaking and sounds are reaching my ears and none of it registers as language because there is nothing left inside me that has an opinion about his presence on this planet.

I am emptied out. Gutted and left on the ice and whatever used to live inside my chest has flown to Switzerland with a man who smirked at me and said “wouldn’t think of it” like I was nothing.

—

Rafael waits. I’ll give him that he waits longer than I expect, crouched in the snow beside me, patient as a man who has nowhere else to be.

And when it becomes clear that I’m not going to speak or move or acknowledge him in any way, he stands, brushes the snow from his knees, and walks away.

His footsteps fade toward the lodge.

I stay.

The cold does what Rafael couldn’t – it forces a decision my mind refuses to make.

The shaking gets violent enough that my teeth clatter against each other and my fingers stop bending and somewhere in the animal part of my brain, the part that has survived Gale and my mother and every other

person who tried to end me, a voice says ‘get up or die here‘ and dying here feels like giving Knox the satisfaction of knowing he destroyed me, so I get up.

I walk back to the girls sabin without lifting my eyes from the ground. The cabin is filled with silence.

Queenie’s door is hanging open, her things scattered from a fast exit. Rayana’s room is as is – perfectly in

place and perfectly absent.

The contrast of the life this cabin had a few days ago twists my chest in a way I can’t explain, in a way that

puts the worst of the blame on myself.

My room still smells like the shower I took this morning when I still believed today was going to be the day

I talked to Knox.

When I had a plan. When honesty was something still within reach instead of something that detonated in

a way that is irreparable.

I lock the door and sit on the edge of the bed.

Finally, the tears stop – my body has simply run dry and what replaces them is a ringing, hollow nothing that settles into my chest and comes with a flood of the worst.

I lie back and stare at the ceiling and replay every word from that room on a loop I can’t switch off.

Knox’s face when I said “maybe Celeste’s death was mercy.”

The exact moment the light went out behind his eyes, all at once, like someone reached behind his face and unplugged him.

I did that. I went hunting for the worst possible thing I could say and I found it and I drove it through his

ribs and watched it land.

Were my words even earned? The anger, the betrayal, the way I ripped into him about 2016 like I had every right – did I have every right?

He kept the truth from me because he thought he was protecting me from it. And what did I do? The exact same thing with Nathaniel.

He built a bridge of lies and I built one right next to it and we’re both standing on opposite ends wondering why nothing connects anymore and whose fault is it.

Whose fault is it really, when we were both hiding and both lying and both so convinced we were doing it for the right reasons that we couldn’t see we were driving each other insane?

And what is any of it worth? What is the worth of protection that only pushes us further apart?

What is the point of shielding someone from the truth when the truth finds its way out anyway and detonates worse than it would have if you’d just SAID it?

What if he hates me now? What if the Celeste thing – goddess, the Celeste thing line and I crossed it and there’s no coming back?

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