TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 250

CHAPTER 182: DINNER DATE

EMBER’S POV

I stare at him.

Then I look at the people around the table – twenty faces, twenty blank expressions, twenty pairs of eyes watching a woman tied to a chair being told she’s someone’s fated mate by the person who drugged her unconscious and dressed her like a doll, and not a single one of them registers anything beyond polite dinner–party interest.

He is insane. Not dangerous–insane the way I’ve dealt with before, not Gale’s abusive cruelty or my mother’s dramatics.

This is the other kind. The kind that feels worse and masquerades with his performative charm.

My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my ears, but I force myself to breathe, to think, to catalogue.

The restraints: silk, tied in a knot I can feel against the underside of the chair arm – aesthetics prioritised

over security.

The exits: two doors, one behind Rafael’s end of the table leading deeper into the lodge, one to my left

leading to the main entrance.

But both are flanked by men in suits who are not eating and not pretending to eat and whose jackets bulge

at the hip in a way that means weapons.

The staff–guests: twenty–ish, unarmed, focused on maintaining the illusion.

Rafael: forty feet away, relaxed, so confident that he hasn’t considered the possibility this evening goes any direction other than the one he planned.

That confidence is his weakness. I just have to figure out how to use it.

“You dressed me,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than feel. “While I was unconscious. You put me in this dress and did my hair and my makeup and tied me to a chair. Do you even see how sick this is?”

“I wanted you to feel beautiful for our first real evening together.” He says it without a flicker of shame.” The dress is Valentino. I had it flown in from Milan weeks ago. I saw it online and thought of you immediately – the colour, the cut. It was made for your body, Ember. I wasn’t wrong.”

“You drugged me, Rafael, then stripped me naked to put me a fucking dress!”

“I sedated you. There’s a distinction. My actions were necessary. Don’t make me the villain here, Ember.” He begins walking toward me again – slowly, savouring the distance between us. “You wouldn’t listen. You wouldn’t stay. You were going to walk out into the cold and disappear to some sad little house in Alaska

I physically could not and waste yourself grieving a man who doesn’t deserve your tears, and I couldn’t allow that to happen.”

CHAPTERJA BINNER CATE

“So you kidnapped me instead.”

“I intervened.” He’s halfway down the table now, and the guests continue their conversations around him as if the host strolling toward his bound dinner companion is perfectly normal dinner theatre. “The way someone intervenes when the person they care about is about to make a catastrophic mistake. You’ll thank me eventually. Not tonight, perhaps. But eventually.”

He reaches my end of the table and pulls out the chair beside me – close enough that I can smell his cologne and the wine on his breath and something under both that is almost attractive if he wasn’t a bloody nutcase.

He sits, crosses one leg over the other, and turns to face me with the full force of his attention, and I understand in this moment what makes Rafael Montenegro so dangerous – it isn’t the strength or the money or the obsession.

It’s the way he looks at you.

Like you are the most important thing in the universe and he has infinite patience and nowhere else to be

and nothing in his life matters except the next words that come out of your mouth.

“Ask me anything,” he says. “Anything you want to know. Tonight is about honesty, Ember. Total, complete,

unfiltered honesty. Something Knox could never give you.”

I study him.

The candlelight paints his face in gold and shadow and he is, objectively, unfairly handsome eyes, the jaw, the mouth that curves like it was designed specifically for sin.

the gray

If I met this man at a party without context, without history, without the knowledge of what he’s done, I would have been drawn to him. Any woman would.

That’s what makes the whole thing so grotesque – the packaging is perfect and the thing inside it is rotten and I trusted the packaging for weeks and that makes me as foolish as I’ve ever been.

But foolish doesn’t mean powerless. And I’m done being powerless.

I let my shoulders drop, allowing the tension drain from my posture, slowly, the way you’d lower a weapon

to show surrender.

I let my head tilt slightly to the side.

“The dress is beautiful,” I say, and it comes out somewhat warm, though sad. “Who helped you choose it?”

Something shifts behind his eyes – part surprise, part hunger, part the hope he’s been feeding since the

summit.

He wasn’t expecting softness. He was braced for fighting, for screaming, for the version of Ember who slapped him across the face.

This version – the one who’s looking at him through lowered lashes and asking about the dress — this is

* CHAPTER IN PINNED DATE

the version he’s been building the fantasy aroundh

“No one helped me,” he says, and his voice has dropped too, matching mine, two people speaking in the register of intimacy. “Tchose it myself. I spent three hours in the online going through every dress they had because none of them were right until this one and the moment I saw it I knew.”

“You spent three hours choosing a dress for me.”

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify