TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 240

5 CHART FAIZ AS THE MOLA BY ESTATE

CHAPTER 174: THE VOLKOV ESTATE

KNOX’S POV

The car is waiting. The driver knows where to go because Rayana arranged everything while I was busy drinking myself into a productive stupor, and the route from the airport to the Volkov estate is one I could

drive blindfolded.

Every turn mapped in muscle memory from a childhood spent being driven to and from this place in the

back of cars with tinted windows, because Alexei didn’t want the neighbours to see his son’s bruises.

The gates appear. Iron, old, the Volkov crest embedded in metalwork that my great–grandfather

commissioned and my father never bothered to maintain.

The Volkov packs have always been in North America – territories spanning half the continent, thousands

of wolves answering to the crown – but Zürich was the one bubble outside reality our ancestors carved

for themselves.

A private estate, a family home, far from the world and the wolves we ruled.

Perhaps it was because of the madness that often came in their latter days, but one thing that has been

consistent with Volkov men is the need to alienate themselves the older they got, to retreat somewhere the world could never see what happens when a Lycan has lost its mind.

The property beyond the gates is exactly as I remember – the Volkov estate stretching across the Swiss hillside, the house sitting at its centre like a wound that never healed, and at the eastern edge, there is the small private cemetery where my family has buried its dead for generations.

Our closest allies too, by invitation. An honour that most people had the good sense not to accept.

My father is there, and the same for my grandparents. My mother is there. Rayana’s mother is there. Side by side, the way they lived. As best friends.

Rayana gets out of the car first.

I watch her walk toward the cemetery path – slower than she should be moving, one Hand pressed to her ribs where the coughing did its damage, and the greyness is worse in the evening light, worse against the green of the manicured grounds that some caretaker has apparently been maintaining in the absence of anyone who gives a damn.

I get out.

The air smells like Switzerland – cold and clean and soothing, like the mountains are breathing on you, and under it is the specific Volkov legacy that is built on blood and bones.

The cemetery is small. A dozen plots, maybe less, surrounded by a low stone wall with moss growing

between the cracks.

Rayana finds her mother’s grave immediately. She drops to her knees in front of the headstone and

presses both hands against the stone and hows her head and I look away.

My mother’s grave is four plots to the right.

I can see it from where I’m standing without turning my head and I don’t walk toward it because walking toward it would mean acknowledging that it exists and acknowledging that it exists would mean

acknowledging that the woman under the headstone chose to leave me in this place and I have built an entire personality around not acknowledging that.

But I can see, even from here, that it’s neglected.

The headstone is darkened with grime. The plot is overgrown. The flowers if there were ever flowers – are long dead.

My father is buried beside her, because of course he is, because even in death he couldn’t give her space,

and his plot is equally neglected because the only person who might have tended it killed him and left the

country and never came back.

Yes, that would be me.

I left her here, and have not once returned.

Coming back here always meant stepping through those gates and breathing this air and remembering

what it felt like to be the boy who lived in that house, and I chose to let her rot rather than face that.

Son of the year, I know.

“Knox.”

It’s a voice that I don’t first recognise. Old, female, and coming from the path behind me.

I turn and find a woman standing at the edge of the cemetery.

She’s small

elderly, weathered, and wearing a heavy wool coat despite the mild evening. Her hair is white and pulled back severely and her face has a familiarity I can’t quite place.

She’s looking at me like she’s seeing a ghost.

“My Goddess,” she says, and her voice breaks on the words. “Knox, is that really you? You look exactly like

him.”

I know who she is before she says her name.

The recognition lives in every part of my childhood memories, and the way she clasps her hands in front of her stomach, a habit she hasn’t outgrown even after so many years.

“Mathilde.”

“You remember.” Her face splits into a smile so warm and so genuine that it lands in my chest.

Mathilde. My mother’s dearest maid, her closest companion in the house, the woman who braided her hair and kept her secrets and brought me warm milk when I couldn’t sleep and cleaned the blood off the

kitchen flour on the mornings after.

When my father’s condition worsened and the staff fled one by one episodes – Mathilde was the only one who stayed.

–

driven out by fear or fired during the

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