TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 235

CHAHWIN THE INDY WWMAN IN THE NOVINA

CHAPTER 170: THE ONLY WOMAN IN THE ROOM

EMBER’S POV

I wonder whether he’s still on the plane or already landed.

Whether Rayana is talking to him or whether they’re sitting in the silence of every damage from today –

the silence of Nathaniel’s journal, of the bloody gash Knox left across his face, of my own words and lies

stacking up beside his.

I wonder whether he’s drinking – he’s probably drinking. Whether he’s replaying the same loop I am or

whether the “wouldn’t think of it” was a lie and he’s already regretting saying it out loud.

I wonder if he is thinking of me at all.

My phone is on the nightstand. I reach for it knowing what I want to find and knowing I won’t find it, yet still hoping painfully, desperately.

But there is nothing from Knox. The screen is full of notifications but his name is absent in every single

one of them.

What is there: eleven messages from Queenie.

Ember please let me explain I know you’re angry and you have every right to be Please just let me Ember 1 need you to know that I never wanted Please Just tell me you’re okay Ember please I’m so sorry Just tell me you’re safe Please

Eleven messages, each one shorter than the last, the apologies shrinking because she knows they’re landing on nothing.

I read them all. Twice. And the thing that hits hardest is the “just tell me you’re safe.” Queenie, even now, even after everything, is worried about whether I survived the day.

The betrayal doesn’t get better or worse because of that. It just gets more complicated.

The woman who handed my abuser the keys to my cage also genuinely cares whether in okay, and I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to hold both of those truths at the same time.

I type: Don’t contact me again.

Then send and delete the thread. I place my phone face down on the nightstand.

What now?

The question stays with me as the hours pass. What had ever been the plan for me after Knox? Despite him, beyond him what was the plan? Get a job? Find a new apartment? Move on, start over?

The manila envelope from this morning catches my eye.

It’s till on the floor by the bed where Rafael dropped it before storming out with a bruised ego.

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4 ODWTCCRG THE ONLY WANAMIN THE BONİM

# feels like eons ago right now, and I’d do anything to go back to the moments of this morning, the

moment where Rayana came in with the elaborate breakfast in bed, and my biggest problem was what happened in 2016.

Against my own broken heart, I sit on the floor, pull the envelope closer and open it.

There are papers first. Lots and lots of papers.

Nathaniel’s correspondence with Gale’s pack, financial breakdowns of what Knox was willing to pay, and a full draft of the “arrangement” written up like a contract when he’d have access to me, how often, under what conditions, what happened if either party wanted to renegotiate.

My entire existence reduced to clauses and subclauses and neat little paragraphs, and the pain from this morning bites deeper now, sharper, more gruesome with the proof in my hands.

Because I had believed we met through fate.

That he was the man who saw me beyond a piece of meat, beyond the long line of men who looked at me and saw property first and a person never.

He was our king. He saw me suffering at Gale’s side for years. And he didn’t care.

The photographs came next.

They are candid shots, surveillance–style, taken from across rooms, across banquet halls, across conference tables. And they were all of me.

Me at events I barely remember, standing beside Gale, wearing dresses I was told to wear, smiling smiles! was told to smile. Dozens of them spanning what looks like two years of summit events, pack gatherings, diplomatic dinners.

And on the photos was his handwriting behind each one. Knox’s personal scrawl, messy and quick, like notes he made for himself and never expected anyone else to read.

On a photo of me sitting beside Gale at a banquet table, staring at my plate: Third event in a row where she hasn’t spoken to anyone who isn’t staff. Gale hasn’t looked at her once.

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On a photo of me standing near a window during a cocktail hour, half–turned from the camera: Yellow dress. Terrible colour on her. Still the only person in the room worth looking at.

On a photo of me laughing at something a catering server said: She smiled at the caterer. No one else noticed. She has a dimple on the left side. I noticed.

On a photo of me catching a gaze across a crowded conference room: Looked right at me for three seconds. I doubt she even knows who I am. Embarrassingly, I couldn’t breathe.

On a photo of me leaving an event with Gale’s hand on the small of my back, my posture stiff, my face blank: The way she walks with him. She doesn’t seem okay… or happy.

On the back of a photo from a territorial summit, scrawled sideways: Gale’s new haircut makes him look

CHEVERIAE FATE ONLY WOMAN IN THE ROOMA

like an aggressive thumb.

And tucked between two financial pages, circled in the background of a wide shot focused on me, a blurry

figure at the edge of the frame with an arrow pointing to it and the words: Fourth event. Still haven’t spoken

to her. Beginning to think might be a coward, which is new.

A laugh tears out of me, but it soon collapses into a sob before it’s finished leaving my mouth. Because

these are funny.

Some of them are genuinely, painfully funny in a way that is so specifically Knox I can hear his voice while reading them, the dry self–aware bite he comes with.

And they are devastating too, in a way that makes my heart ache and yearn, and in some way wish we met earlier, genuinely, like two strangers that existed before our world damaged us.

The notes tell me more than his drunken words had, the notes show me a man who sat in rooms full of powerful people and couldn’t stop watching one woman he’d never spoken to and couldn’t stop recording the small, irrelevant details of her existence.

Like she was the only genuine thing in his world and he was far too intrigued to look away.

I hold the photo of myself smiling at the caterer and I cry – properly, completely, the kind of crying that uses your whole body and empties you out to your very core.

I regret the door I didn’t open. I regret the Celeste words I can’t take back.

I regret every second of I believed I was protecting him from Nathaniel, and the regret is so physical it bends me in half over the photographs and I press them against my chest and hold them there like they’re the last piece of him I’ll ever have.

After a long time, I fold everything back into the envelope, tuck it into my bag, and wipe my face.

That is the moment I decide to pack my things, just in time for the first knock that comes by noon.

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