TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 246

CHAPTER 178:1 LOVE HER

KNOX’S POV

“I said I’m not doing this, Rayana.”

“And I said we should have turned the plane around and you didn’t listen to that either.” She pulls her knees up, mirroring my position, two people sitting in a haunted hallway like children who’ve been sent to their rooms. “You’re doing exactly what your father did. You know that, right? Alexei pushed away everyone who tried to love him. Your mother tried to save him and he locked her in this house. I tried to love you and you walled me out until I ran. Celeste tried and you-”

“Don’t say her name.”

“Celeste tried and you refused to give her the one thing she needed and she broke under the weight of being loved by a man who couldn’t love back without conditions, and now you are doing the exact same thing with Ember. Stonewalling and pushing away and convincing yourself she is just like your mother, just like Celeste – and she is NOT, Knox-”

“Rayana-”

“She is NOT Celeste. She didn’t cheat. She didn’t betray you. She stood in front of you and fought for the truth and when you finally gave it to her – drunk, in front of everyone, because Rafael backed you into a corner – she STAYED in that room and fought with you. She didn’t run. YOU ran. You gave her the ugliest truth you had and she took it standing up and you STILL left-”

“I said stop-”

“Your father destroyed your mother with his inability to let her go. And you are destroying Ember with your inability to let her IN. It’s the same curse wearing a different face – him holding too tight, you holding everyone at arm’s length – and the result is identical. The women who love Volkov men end up broken-* “You don’t get to lecture me about running, Rayana. You wrote the manual.”

“You’re right. I did. I left you at an altar because I was terrified of exactly this – of loving a man who carries what you carry and watching it eat him alive the way it ate your father. I was a coward and I ran and I have spent ten years regretting it.” Her voice cracks but she doesn’t stop. “And I fucked up, Knox. I fucked up badly. But I’m not the only one. Nathaniel fucked up. Queenie fucked up. Celeste fucked up. Your father fucked up. Every single person who was supposed to love you either lied to you or left you or failed you in ways you didn’t deserve, and I am sorry for my part in that. I am sorry for ALL of it – for leaving, for not fighting, for being too scared to be the woman you needed. But I will NOT sit here and watch you destroy yourself because of what WE did to you. I won’t let our failures become your excuse to lose the best thing that has happened to you in years. Not on my watch. Not while I still have breath in my body to tell you what a monumental idiot you’re being-”

“RAYANA-”

You are a coward, Knox Volkov. You have always been a coward. And even now, even with her name still

in your mouth from thirty seconds ago, you would let that same cowardice make you lose the one woman who loves you deeply who loves you despite your walls and your cruelty and your relentless, exhausting need to destroy anything good before it can destroy you first-”

“FINE, I LOVE HER.” It rips out of me with a force that shakes something loose in my chest, something that has been lodged there since the fight, since the helicopter, since the moment I looked Ember in the eye and said “wouldn’t think of it” when every cell in my body was thinking of nothing else. “I fucking love her. Is that what you want to hear? I love her and I LEFT her. I left her with HIM. I am sitting in this house where my father beat the love out of me and I am doing the exact same thing he did – running from the only

person who-”

I can’t finish. But it’s out. Hanging in the air of my dead mother’s hallway like smoke from a fire i can’t take back. But I don’t stop, the rest follows, breath tighter.

“I am choosing to leave rather than choosing to stay because staying means showing her everything and everything includes THIS.” I hold up the letter with a hand that won’t stop trembling. “It includes this house and this hallway and a mother who killed herself and a father I killed and a gene that turns the men in my bloodline into massacres waiting to happen. It includes the fact that Nathaniel has been drugging me and documenting me like a fucking animal for ten years because even my own Beta thinks I’m one bad day from becoming my father. And she–Ember–she already thinks I’m a monster. She told me Celeste’s death was mercy. She looked at me and saw what everyone sees-”

“She looked at you and saw a man she loved enough to scream at. There’s a bloody difference.”

I stop. The words dry up mid–flood and I stare at Rayana and she stares back and there’s something on her face that I haven’t seen before.

“You don’t scream at people you’ve given up on, Knox. You go quiet. You close the door and you walk away and you never look back.” She reaches over and takes the letter from my hand, gently, the way you take a sharp object from someone who might hurt themselves with it. “She screamed at you. She fought you. She said the cruellest thing she could find because she wanted you to FEEL it. That’s not a woman who’s done

ľ with you. That’s a woman who’s furious that you won’t let her in.”

The silence that follows is different from the earlier silence. Less poisonous. More exhausted. Two people who’ve been fighting and have finally landed on something true.

My heart is pounding so fast.

“I need to tell you something,” Rayana says, and her voice has changed. It’s a lot smaller now, shakier. ” should have told you on the plane but I was scared, and then the cemetery, and then – I should have told you three days ago, actually, but I wanted-”

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