TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 265

CHAPTER 195: 48 HOURS

KNOX’S POV

It’s hardly a fight, and more like an extermination. Every wolf that crosses the perimeter I’ve drawn in my mind around Ember’s position dies.

I don’t give warnings. I don’t posture or snarl or give them the chance to retreat.

They came for my woman and that is a death sentence and I deliver it with the cold commitment of a man who has found, for the first time in his life, something worth protecting badly enough to become the thing everyone always feared he was.

Six wolves. Maybe seven.

I lose count because counting requires the part of my brain that’s currently occupied by the sound of

Ember whimpering behind me and every whimper is a lash across the part of my conscience that knows I

caused this by leaving.

At the final point of the clearing is a face I didn’t think I’d see in a while.

Logan.

He’s standing at the edge of the tree line, battered and bloody from whatever my purge of his wolves cost him, watching me with wide eyes that had just witnessed his men get slaughtered and is rapidly recalculating his odds of survival.

He is not interested in a fight, that much is evident from his distance. At least he is clever.

“Give me Gale, Volkov.” His voice is strained but steady. “Give him back and you’ll never hear from either of us again. We disappear. Permanently.”

I keep walking toward him. Easy strides. Unhurried. The blood on my claws isn’t mine and I’m not done

adding to it.

“I’m not interested in sharing.”

“This isn’t about sharing – this is a trade. You get peace. I get Gale. We vanish from your life forever. That’s a good deal, Knox. Take it.”

“I’ll make you disappear myself when I get to where you’re standing.”

Logan’s composure wavers. He pushes off the tree, staggering, his voice pitching into something desperate and furious and stripped of every last shred of strategy.

“Fine. Fine! Since you insist on being a selfish arsehole – you think you’re the only one deserving of love, Knox? The only one who gets a happy ending? I’ll destroy it all. Every last piece of it.” He reaches into his jacket and produces a flash drive, holding it up so the moonlight catches it. “Forty–eight hours. Give me Gale back and you stay Lycan King. If not, the world will know what you did the night your mate died.

EVERYTHING.” His eyes flick to Ember behind me. “If I don’t get to rest, neither do you. Neither does she.”

Then he shifts and disappears into the dark.

What the fuck was that? What does he have?

44

What does he think he knows about Celeste’s night that I don’t — and how did he get it when I can’t even access my own memories of what happened?

The questions claw at me but Ember is behind me and her whimpers have turned into something more urgent and when I turn back to her she’s curled on her side in the snow with her arms wrapped around herself and her body shaking so violently I can see it from twenty feet away and the heat is CONSUMING her.

Nathaniel’s voice comes from somewhere to my left, battered in his human form, the voice of a man

approaching a bomb.

“Knox. She needs cold water. There’s a river east of here, a quarter mile. Her temperature is critical – if it spikes much higher the compound will start damaging her organs. You need to get her there. NOW.”

I snarl at him without looking. Full subhuman warning.

“I know.” Nathaniel doesn’t retreat. “I know you want to kill me. I know I deserve it. But she is hurting, Knox. Right now, in front of you, she is really hurting. And you can’t fix it by holding her.”

Queenie’s voice, small and terrified and braver than it has any right to be: “Please, Knox. We can help. Let

us help.”

I look at Ember. Her breathing is too fast, too shallow. Her skin so hot that the snow around her is melting into muddy slush.

She’s deteriorating and I can see it happening in real time and the terror that this woman might die in my arms in a forest because I LEFT HER, because my PRIDE put her here, because I chose Switzerland over her – that terror is bigger than my rage at Nathaniel, bigger than Phantom’s possessiveness, bigger than

anything.

I pick her up. She’s burning against my chest and the contact sends a bolt of sensation through me that makes my vision go white. Phantom surges and I shove him down and run.

The river is exactly where Nathaniel said it would be because of course Nathaniel is never wrong about logistics, because the man I want to kill is also the man who just saved the woman I love and I don’t have the capacity to hold both of those truths right now so I hold Ember instead and wade into the water. The cold is savage, Alaskan mountain water, barely above freezing, hitting my overheated skin and her feverish body simultaneously.

Ember screams and I hold her against me and let the river pour over us both and whisper things against her hair that I would deny saying if anyone asked.

“I’m here. I know, I know. You’re shaking – give that to me, let me have it, I’ll carry it. I’ll carry all of it.

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