TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 264

CHAPTER 194: YOU CAME

KNOX’S POV

Rafael fights with desperate, unhinged conviction. He believes this.

he has convinced himself so

That’s what makes him terrifying and pathetic in equal measure completely that Ember is his fated mate that he’s willing to die for a delusion.

And the ferocity of that belief makes him dangerous because men who fight for what they love are always more vicious than men who fight for what they want.

But I am not fighting for what I want. I am fighting for what I CHOSE. For a woman who told me to never

come back and a letter that told me to stay and a choice I made on a tarmac in Switzerland that I will die

before I unmake.

He grabs a fallen trunk in his claws – massive, an entire pine – and swings it at me like a battering ram.

The impact catches me across the ribs and sends me crashing through two smaller trees before I hit the ground hard enough to taste blood.

My vision whites out for a second and I feel the feral gene SURGE, the man receding, the beast expanding, exactly the way my father described it in his lucid moments before the worst episodes – “it’s like drowning from the inside, Knox, like something eating you alive and wearing your face” – and I am right there on the edge of the same cliff that Alexei fell off and never climbed back from.

But my mother’s voice is in my skull. Choose to stay. Stay yourself. Stay the man, not the beast.

I get up. I shake off the blood.

And I come at Rafael with something worse than feral rage – precision. Controlled, calculated, clever. Every technique I’ve ever learned to fight the beast inside me, turned on the beast in front of me.

I catch his arm mid–swing and twist it against the joint until the bone snaps.

He howls and staggers and I’m already behind him, claws raking down his spine, severing the tendons in his leg with a single downward slash.

He collapses to one knee, then both.

I drive him face–first into the frozen ground and my claws close around his throat and this is it, this is the moment, one squeeze and he dies and Phantom is HOWLING for me to do it, to finish it, to crush the windpipe and feel the life drain out and END the man who touched my woman-

Rafael shifts back to human under me. His wolf form recedes and suddenly it’s a man under my claws, broken and bleeding, golden eyes dimming, and his mouth moves and the words come out wet with

blood:

“She chose me… at the dinner… she came to me… she sat in my lap and she wanted me…”

My teeth tighten. His throat compresses.

“You stripped her naked,” I snarl through the shift, my voice barely human, “and pinned her to the ground and you think that is Tove You think that’s what a true mate would do to his fated? You’re nothing but a rabid dog without honour And you’d die for it.”

I slam his skull into the frozen ground with a force that I feel through my own skeleton Once. Twice. Three times. His eyes roll back. His body goes limp.

The golden glow fades from his irises and what’s left is just a man, broker in the snow, bleeding from wounds that won’t close quickly, his jaw shattered, his legs destroyed, his ribs caved on one side.

Not breathing in any way that looks sustainable.

I leave him. Rafael Montenegro is dead or dying and either outcome satisfies my wolf and I have already given him more of my time than he ever deserved.

Ember.

I shift back and the cold hits my naked body but I don’t feel it because she’s ten feet away and she’s shaking and her skin is on fire and her eyes are glazed and she’s lying in the snow where he left her, bare and burning and reaching for something that isn’t there.

I drop to my knees beside her.

My hands find her face and the heat coming off her skin is alarming, a fever that goes beyond temperature into something systemic, the compound rewriting her biology from the inside.

She flinches at the contact and then recognizes my scent and the flinch becomes a reach, her fingers finding my jaw, my neck, the cuts and bruises.

“Knox.” My name in her mouth, slurred with heat but present. “You came back.”

“I came back.”

The guilt is instantaneous and annihilating.

I left her. I flew to Switzerland with another woman while Rafael was circling her like a predator and she was hunted by him.

I told her I wouldn’t come back with a smile designed to wound and then I wounded myself worse by actually leaving and the twelve hours between that helicopter and this forest are the most unforgivable hours of my life and I will spend whatever time I have on this earth atoning for every minute of them.

I pull her against my chest and she comes willingly, desperately, her burning body pressed against my cold skin and the contrast makes us both gasp.

She’s naked and I’m naked and the heat scent pouring off her is driving Phantom into a frenzy that I am controlling through sheer force of will and the knowledge that if I lose control now I am no better than the man I just left broken in the snow

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