TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 243

CHAPTER 176: MY DARLING BOY–1

KNOX’S POV

She turns and walks back up the path toward the house, and the lights are on warm yellow through old windows, the house glowing against the Swiss dusk like somewhere people lived and loved and were happy, which is the cruelest lie a house can tell.

I glance toward the cemetery. Rayana is still at her mother’s grave, lost in her own grief. She doesn’t know what I’m holding. She doesn’t know what I’m about to walk into.

I walk toward the house, and for a moment, it feels like being transported to a older time, not by any

chance a simpler one, but one where I at least had a family.

The front door opens the way it always did a slight resistance in the hinges that my father never fixed.

The kitchen is to the left. I don’t go in.

I can see it from the hallway – the counter where my father lifted me up to watch my mother cook, the

floor where they danced, the window where the morning light used to pour in and make everything golden and lying – and if I walk in there the memory will be so vivid and so false that it will kill whatever’s left of my ability to function.

The stairs creak on the third step. They always creaked on the third step.

Once upon a time, the heavy thud against it, harsh and aggressive, meant my father was slipping into his periodic madness, moments where he lost control of his Lycan and haunted the house with a thirst for

blood.

With a thirst for making his own family his prey.

The hallway at the top. The runner is faded now, the pattern almost invisible, but my feet know it.

My body knows this house the way it knows breathing – automatically, helplessly, with the kind of knowledge that lives in muscle and bone and can’t be reasoned away.

My mother’s bedroom door is closed. It’s always been closed, I think. Closed since the day she locked it and never opened it again.

I sit in the hallway. Back against the wall and my knees drawn up. The same position I sat in as a boy, night after night, listening to her cry on the other side.

She always did love to throw herself between the two men she loved far too much – myself and my

father.

I wished he made it simpler by being a horrible man. I wished he was deliberately a monster, because that would have made hating him easier.

But his moments of madness were never within his control we understood that. It was a gene his father

WNE

– HET B

had carried and one he was cursed to carry as well.

We understood that he was still father and husband underneath the skin of the devil he became.

We understood that the blood he spilled was never his intention, even if the blood was ours, even if it was our flesh on his claws and our throats in his grip and the banging and banging and banging on our doors every single night.

We understood and understood and understood, until my mother took her life. Until she had enough of

understanding.

I open the envelope.

“My darling boy,

If you are reading this, then Mathilde has kept her promise, and for that I am grateful to her in ways I could

never express while I was alive.

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