TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 247

CHAPTER 179: ONLY TWO WEEKS

KNOX’S POV

“I know you’ve been told I’m terminal and I know you think that means years, maybe, or months at least, because that’s what terminal sounds like from the outside a long, slow, dignified decline with time to prepare.” She pulls her arms tighter around herself and I can see her hands shaking and the grey of her skin and the thinness of her wrists and the blood she coughed up on the plane and all of it rearranges itself into a picture I should have read hours ago. Days ago. “I have two weeks. Maybe less. The herbs that have been keeping me upright are failing. Dr. Patel told me at the summit when you left with Ember – the updated scans, the bloodwork, all of it and I was sitting in the corridor afterwards crying like an idiot when Rafael found me.”

Her words land and rearrange everything I thought I understood about the woman sitting beside me. Six months – that’s what she told everyone. Six months at most.

Enough time to plan, to prepare, to say goodbyes at a reasonable pace. But two weeks isn’t a timeline. Two weeks is a countdown with no room for anything except the truth.

And I look at her – really look, the way I should have been looking for weeks – and the signs are so obvious now that I feel sick for missing them.

The greyness isn’t exhaustion. The thinness isn’t stress. The coughing on the plane, the blood on her palm, the way she’s been holding herself together with manic energy and bright smiles and sheer force of will she’s been dying in front of me this entire time and I was too consumed by my own wreckage to see it.

Something twists in my chest that I don’t expect.

Not pity – Rayana would slap me if she smelled pity – but a grief that catches me off guard.

This woman who drove me insane and left me at an altar and showed up at the summit with her bucket list and her terminal diagnosis and her relentless, exhausting ALIVENESS – she is going to be gone.

Soon.

“Why didn’t you say something earlier?” My voice comes out rougher than I intend. “We could have – I don’t know. Planned something for you. A proper send–off, a party, anything-”

Rayana shrugs, and the gesture is so casual for a woman delivering her own eulogy that it guts me. “Because I wanted it to be honest.” She picks at a thread on her cloth. “The moment you tell people you’re dying, everything changes. The laughs get softer. The conversations get careful. Everyone starts treating you like glass and looking at you with that face – you know the face, the one that says ‘I’m so sorry‘ while their eyes are already mourning you before you’ve finished your sentence.” She shakes her head. “I wanted one good thing before it all goes to shit. One real memory where people laughed because something was actually funny, not because they felt sorry for me. Where someone looked at me and saw Rayana.” Her voice thins. “I wanted to earn a genuine friendship with Ember. Maybe Queenie too. I wanted to be seen as

a person. Maybe even a good one. Not a fucking grade A bitch. Not the dying ex–fiancée.” Her eyes fill and she blinks hard but the tears come anyway. “But then everything exploded and I never got the chance and now Ember hates me and I’m going to die without ever–”

She stops and bites her lip bard enough that I see the skin whiten under her teeth.

The tears are running freely now and she swipes at them with the back of her hand, angry at herself for breaking, and then she laughs – a wet, fractured sound that has no business being as brave as it is.

“This is pathetic. Goddess – crying like a fucking child on the floor of a haunted house. Come on, Rayana. This is not a very fabulous look on you.”

A chuckle escapes me before I can stop it – small and sad and surprised out of me by the sheer absurdity of this woman worrying about her image while her body eats itself alive.

“Only you, Rayana. Only you would be worried about being fabulous right now.”

She shrugs with a watery laugh. “It has always been one of my finer qualities. Pretending to be okay. Smiling. The whole bouquet of performance.”

“You taught me that.” The words leave me quietly. “How to play pretend.”

Rayana’s eyes dim, and for a moment she looks like the girl I knew before she was a model and I was a king and the world got its claws into both of us.

She nods slowly.

“The first step is always to close your eyes and imagine yourself in a better time. The bang on the door is not a monster-”

“It’s the heartbeat of the house,” I finish, and the words come from somewhere so deep and so old that they taste like childhood. “The pounding means it wants to play hide and seek.”

“And the footsteps mean you need to hide in your best spots,” she continues, and her voice is a whisper now, “and don’t make the game an easy one.”

My chest twists because this – THIS is what Rayana was before the Vogue covers and the broken engagement and the terminal diagnosis. Before everything.

She was the girl who came over with her mother Beatrice, and Beatrice would disappear into the kitchen with Katherine and they’d pour wine and trade gossip for hours while Rayana and I played pretend in the

garden.

Two children chasing butterflies through the hedges of a house that terrified me, making up games to turn the monsters into something we could outrun.

She was the one patch of sunshine in a life defined by locked doors and quiet before the storm, and even after she left me at the altar, even after everything, I could never fully hate her because she was woven into the only good memories this place holds.

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