TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 277

CHAPTER 207: MY LOVE

EMBER’S POV

I blink and the tears spill anyway, sliding down my cheeks into his palms, and he catches them there, holds them, and the expression on his face while he watches me cry happy tears is something I want to photograph and frame and hang on every wall of that house in Portugal.

“When Rafael had me on the floor-” The words come before I’ve decided to say them, pulled from somewhere urgent and deep. “When he was on top of me and my body was betraying me and I couldn’t fight and I couldn’t scream and I thought that was it, that was how my story ended – the only thing that kept me fighting, Knox. The only thing that kept my will alive for one more second. Was you.” My fingers curl into his shirt. “Not the hope of being rescued. Not Sapphire. YOU. The thought of you. The memory of your hands and your voice and the way you look at me when you think I’m not paying attention. I escaped into you to survive him.”

His jaw tightens and his eyes go bright again but he doesn’t look away.

“And the only thing worse than what he was doing to me was the thought that I might die on that floor and the last words between us would have been the worst ones. That you’d go the rest of your life believing‘ maybe Celeste’s death was mercy‘ was my final message. That this thing-” I press my hand against my own chest, over the heartbeat he’s been counting for thirty–one hours. “This thing that has been trapped in here for weeks, this stupid, enormous, terrifying feeling that it would die with me on a dining room floor and you would never, ever know it existed.”

“Say it now,” he says, and his voice is rough and wrecked and barely holding. “We have all the time now.

Give it to me. Your feelings. Your heart. Every inch of you. Give me the entirety of your soul.”

“I love you.” It comes out like exhaling. Like something my lungs have been holding for years finally releasing. “I love you and I loved you when I locked that door and I loved you when I said don’t come back and I loved you when I was screaming your name in the snow and bleeding from my throat trying to reach you. None of the angry things were ever about not loving you. They were about loving you so much it

terrified me.”

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He kisses me. Tongue deep and slow and intentional, the kind of kiss that doesn’t ask for anything because it already has everything it needs.

His hands slide into my hair and mine find his jaw and we’re both not breathing and neither of us cares because breathing is for people who haven’t just torn themselves open at a kitchen counter and found the other person waiting inside the wound.

The kiss tastes like an eternity neither of us has earned but both are so desperate for. Like fireworks behind closed eyelids and racing hearts pressed so close they sync.

Like slow mornings we haven’t had yet and music drifting from a kitchen where a man in sweatpants flips eggs and smiles when he hears her footsteps.

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Like every second of us every fight and every silence and every almost

woven into something so stubborn that even the fabric of existence could conspire against it and still come up short.

When we pull apart, his forehead finds mine. His thumbs are wet with my tears and neither of us wipes them because they’ve earned their place.

“My love,” he says, testing it. Rolling it around in his mouth. “My love. My woman. My-” He pauses and considers. “Are you my mate? Is that what this is? Because your wolf called me that in the forest and I’ve been trying to make sense of it and I can’t because I’ve been told my whole life that Lycans don’t get second chances, that the bond dies with the first mate, and yet every cell in my body SCREAMS you. You are my true north, Ember. You have been since the bathroom on that plane. And I don’t understand it and I

can’t explain it and I have read every text on mate bonds that exists and none of them account for what

you are to me.”

“Sapphire called you our true mate,” I say. “When I was running from Rafael. She’d never said it before.

Never even hinted. And it doesn’t make sense because the bond is supposed to reveal itself immediately,

from the first touch, and ours didn’t-”

“Didn’t it?” He pulls back enough to look at me. “The bathroom on the plane. When I touched your arm and every nerve in my body caught fire. When your scent hit me and Phantom went so still I thought he’d

stopped breathing. When I looked at you for the first time with Gale, and I thought mine. The irrational,

desperate need to have you in my life, even if it demanded bypassing protocol or right and wrong. MINE.

Like a fact. Like gravity. Like something my wolf understood before my brain caught up.”

“That’s not how the textbooks describe it.”

“The textbooks were written by men who never met you.”

“Knox.”

“My love.” He grins, boyish and warm and so different from the smirk I’ve grown used to. “I’m going to say that a lot, by the way. My love. It tastes good. Like something I should have been saying all along. My love at breakfast. My love in the garden. My love, stop stealing food off my plate-”

“I don’t steal food off your plate.”

“You absolutely do. You did it at the summit dinner. Twice. You thought I wasn’t looking.”

“You were talking to Nathaniel!”

“I was talking to Nathaniel AND counting my potatoes, Ember. I’m a multitasker.” His thumb traces my lip. My love. My potato thief. My everything.”

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