TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 249

CHAPTER 181: WELCOME, QUERIDA

EMBER’S POV

There is something exquisitely wrong.

My body registers the details before my mind catches up the luxurious texture of a dress I don’t remember wearing, the pull of my hair swept up off my neck in a way i never style it, the cool press of metal around my wrists.

I blink, and the world assembles itself in pieces: a long dining table draped in fine linen, crystal glasses catching the light of a hundred candles, silver cutlery laid out with the kind of precision that belongs in a Michelin restaurant, and flowers – dark red roses, cascading from centre–pieces down the length of the table.

I am seated at one end of the table.

My wrists are bound to the arms of the chair with silk–cream–coloured and soft and tightly secured yet woven with such careful attention to aesthetics that the restraint are almost beautiful.

My ankles are free. My shoes are gone. And the dress I’m wearing fitted, floor–length, the colour of arterial blood – is not mine. Has never been mine.

Someone put it on me while I was unconscious, and the thought of that sends a wave of nausea through me so violent I have to close my eyes and breathe through it.

My reflection stares back at me from the curve of a silver serving spoon. Hair pinned up in an elegant twist. Makeup flawless, lips stained dark, cheekbones highlighted, lashes lengthened.

I look like someone’s fantasy of a woman at a dinner party, and the fact that I was assembled like this,

dressed and painted while I was under, makes my skin crawl in a way that goes beyond fear into something primal and revolted.

occupled.

The table seats roughly twenty people and every chair is occupied.

Men and women in formal attire, eating, drinking, conversing in low murmurs, gesturing with wine glasses

as if this is the most ordinary evening in the world.

It takes me a disoriented moment to realise they’re staff.

Rafael’s employees, dressed up, playing parts, performing the theatre of a dinner party while a drugged woman sits bound at the head of the table and no one acknowledges the restraints on her wrists.

And at the far end, forty feet of white linen and crystal and candlelight away from me, sits Rafael Montenegro.

He’s wearing a black suit that fits him dangerously well, a white shirt open at the collar, no tie.

His hair is swept back, his jaw freshly shaved around the bruises Knox left.

CHAPIERI WELCOME QUERIDA

A glass of red wine rests in his fingers with such casual elegance, and when his eyes meet mine across the length of that table, the smile he gives me is so warrn, so genuine, so utterly delighted that for one horrifying second my brain tries to tell me this is a date.

“Ah,” he says, and his voice carries down the table in the sweetest baritone. “She wakes. And right on time

the first course is just being served.”

He lifts his glass toward me in a toast, and the guests – the staff, the actors, whatever they are – lift theirs in unison, a choreographed performance of celebration that makes me want to scream.

“Welcome, querida,” Rafael says, “to the Bacchanal.”

I yank against the silk restraints hard enough that the chair legs scrape across the hardwood, and the sound kills the murmured conversations in the room.

The staff–guests falter for half a second before resuming their performance, trained smiles snapping back into place like marionettes on strings.

“You’re a fucking psychopath.” My voice comes out raw and vicious and nothing like the drugged girl who woke up thirty seconds ago. “What IS this? What is this insane – let me GO, Rafael. Right now. Untie me right now.”

He is not fazed the least.

On the contrary, he takes a slow sip of his wine and sets the glass down with patient composure, like he

expected this outburst and could care less for my childish tantrums.

“I must apologise for my darling guest,” he says to the table at large, gesturing toward me as if introducing a slightly temperamental dinner companion. “She is rather rude this evening, but it’s been a difficult few days and we’ll forgive her, won’t we? The wine will help.’

The staff–guests murmur their agreement like a chorus on cue, nodding and smiling at me with blank, creepy faces.

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