TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 263

CHAPTER 193: SHE’S MINE, VOLKOV

KNOX’S POV

I have never run this fast in my life.

Phantom’s paws tear through the Alaskan forest with a force that splits the frozen ground under me, every stride eating distance like the earth itself is shrinking to bring me closer to the thing my wolf has been screaming about since Zürich.

Since Rayana spilled the truth and I left my mother’s letter crumpled in my jacket at the airport and shifted before the tarmac ended because there was no time for cars, no time for roads, no time for anything except the animal and the direction it was pulling and the single, annihilating certainty that I was already too late.

I left Rayana at the Fairbanks airport with my security detail. She could barely stand, the coughing worse, the grey of her skin darker than it was in Zürich, and the last thing she said before I shifted was “bring her back, Knox.”

She said it like a plea and a command at the same time, like a dying woman handing you her final wish and expecting you to carry it because she won’t be alive long enough to see if you do.

Choose to stay.

I am choosing. For the first time in my miserable, self–destructive, wall–building life, I am running toward the fire instead of away from it.

My wolf knows where she is the way a compass knows north, pulling me through miles of wilderness with a certainty that operates below thought, below instinct, in a place I didn’t know existed until this moment.

A frequency that hums in my ribs and says THERE, SHE’S THERE, FASTER, and I am faster.

I am the fastest thing in this forest, every muscle and tendon and bone in Phantom’s body burning with a

single purpose and that purpose has auburn hair and brown eyes with amber flecks and the worst timing of any woman I have ever loved.

Then I smell her.

The heat scent hits me first and it nearly takes my legs out from under me, a wall of pheromones so dense

and so overwhelming that Phantom stumbles mid–stride and every rational thought I possess drowns in a

flood of MATE, CLAIM, MARK, TAKE.

It rolls through me like an avalanche.

But under the heat, under the chemical sweetness that smells manufactured and forced and nothing like

the natural warmth I’ve caught on her skin in softer moments, there is something else

Fear.

CHAPTER 10 HE’S PAINE VIN WO

Hers

The metallic tang of a woman who is terrified, and blood that belongs to her and blood that doesn’t, and the scent of a man I am going to kill.

I crash through the tree line and the scene that greets me is the thing that will live behind my eyelids for the rest of my life.

Ember. Naked in the snow.

The remnants of a red dress scattered around her like someone tore it off her body, because someone did.

Her skin is flushed and burning even in the cold, her body arching off the ground, her eyes glazed with a heat she didn’t choose.

And crouched over her, fingers tracing her collarbone like she’s a gift he’s been waiting years to unwrap, is Rafael Montenegro.

The man I am going to kill.

He is also naked, bloodied, golden–eyed, and looking at the woman I love the way I have seen men look at conquered territory.

His hand is sliding down her neck. She is moaning. She doesn’t consent to the sound and I can see that in

the twist of her face.

Rafael is SAVOURING it, drinking in her involuntary surrender like it’s the most intoxicating thing he’s ever

tasted.

Something inside me detonates.

Something older and vaster and more terrifying than any emotion I have a name for, something that comes from the same place the feral gene lives, the same deep well that consumed my father and killed Celeste and has been sleeping in my blood for a decade waiting for exactly this trigger.

The roar that tears out of Phantom shakes snow from every branch in a hundred–yard radius and vibrates through the ground hard enough to shake the car, and I am moving before the sound finishes leaving my

throat.

I hit Rafael with the full force of a Lycan in flight and the impact rips him off her body and launches him through the air in a spinning arc that ends against a pine trunk thick enough to take the blow.

The tree cracks. Rafael cracks. He hits the ground in a heap of bronze skin and broken branches and for one second I think it’s over, I think the force was enough, I think I’ve ended this-

He shifts.

Mid–fall, mid–impact, his human form dissolving into the massive dark wolf I should have killed the first time I had the chance.

< CHAPTER 1OHET MINE WY KOV

He rises from the snow nearly as large as Phantom, golden eyes burning with no fear and no sanity and no understanding that the creature standing over Ember is something he cannot defeat.

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