TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 272

< CHAPTER 20 HASPECT HER LOVE HER

CHAPTER 202: RESPECT HER. LOVE HER

EMBER’S POV

Knox doesn’t make me explain. He only comes back and sits on the edge of the tub and watches me with those exhausted, yet beautiful eyes while the steam fills the room.

I pull the shirt over my head and climb in.

The hot water meets my skin and I hiss because everything is tender and raw and bruised in places I haven’t finished cataloguing.

I pick up the cloth and start scrubbing. My neck first. Then my collarbone. Then my wrists where the silk left its marks.

Hard enough that the skin goes pink, then red, and the friction feels cleaner than the water, feels like progress, feels like if I press hard enough I can reach the layer under where it’s still just me.

The scrubbing gets harder.

My nails replace the cloth, raking across my forearm, going back to the same spot, and the skin splits and the sting is sharp and clean and honest and I go back again-

Knox’s hands close around both of mine.

He pulls them away from my skin gently, firmly, and holds them still, and I fight him for a second, pulling,

because the scrubbing was doing something the soap couldn’t and I need it, I NEED-

He lifts my left hand out of the water and presses his mouth to my wrist. Right where the silk burned.

A slow, sweet kiss on the raw skin, and the tenderness of it is so startling after the violence of my own

hands that a sound escapes me I wasn’t prepared for.

Then he moves up. His lips brushing the inside of my forearm where my nails just split the skin, and he kisses that too, soft and warm and intentional, and his mouth travels to my shoulder, pressing there,

lingering.

“This,” he murmurs against my skin, “doesn’t deserve what happened to it.” Another kiss, on the curve where my shoulder meets my neck. “And it doesn’t deserve your punishment either.”

His lips find the bruise on my collarbone and he stays there, breathing softly, inhaling.

“Your body survived something terrible, Ember. It fought for you. Kept your heart beating. Carried you through the snow barefoot. It doesn’t deserve your wrath right now.” He kisses the bruise, feather–light. “It deserves your care.” Another kiss on my shoulder. “Your kindness.” His mouth moves to the inside of my other wrist. “And every bit of mine.”

The tears spill over silently and run down my face into the bathwater.

“I just need him out of my memory,” I whisper. “Out of my skin. I close my eyes and he’s still there.”

CHALTER RESPECT HER LOVE HER

“I know.” He pulls back enough to look at me, his hands still holding mine. “We’ll get there.”

“What if we don’t?” I shut my eyes.

“Then I’ll journey to the past and find the day before Montenegro was born and rip his filthy heart out before he draws his first breath.”

I open my eyes.

He’s leaning so far over the tub that his shirt is soaked through, his hair dripping, and he doesn’t seem to have noticed or cared.

His blue eyes are steady on mine and flicker gold when he says the next part.

“I’d drag myself into the underworld to make sure his death is much slower than the one I gave him. Slower and more creative. I have ideas, Ember. I’ve been sitting on that floor for thirty–one hours with nothing to do but think and some of those thoughts were about you and some of them were about the many, many ways I could-”

I laugh.

It catches him off guard – his mouth open mid–sentence, his brow furrowing, and the interruption of his very sincere murder fantasy by my laughter genuinely confuses him.

“What?”

I shake my head, smiling through the tears, and shrug.

“You’re crazy.” I reach up and touch his wet face, his jaw, the bruise there. “You’re absolutely unhinged. And

you’re perfectly my type of deranged.”

The smile that breaks across his face is slow and real and warm and it transforms him – the battered jaw and the split lip and the bruised cheekbone rearranging themselves around a grin that makes him look ten years younger and infinitely more dangerous because Knox Volkov smiling is the most lethal thing in any

room he enters.

“Deranged,” he repeats, tasting the word. “I can work with deranged.”

After, I wore his shirt again, warm socks he found somewhere, carried to the kitchen, soup heated, bread

beside it.

We eat side by side at the counter because I refused to let him stand across from me watching me eat like a sentinel, and his knee presses against mine under the counter and his hand keeps finding my thigh, my wrist, the back of my neck, like his body needs constant confirmation that mine is still here.

The touching this time is almost gravitational.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify