TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 280

CHAPTER 209: START TALKING

EMBER’S POV

Knox sleeps like a man who hasn’t done it in years. Which, knowing him, might actually be the case.

His face in my lap, one arm slung across my thighs, the other tucked under the pillow I wedged beside him around hour three because my leg was going numb and I refused to wake him for something as selfish as blood circulation.

His breathing has been steady for six hours straight. He has had no nightmares or gold flickering behind his lids.

And I have spent every minute of it memorising the architecture of his face without the armour on it.

He looks younger asleep. The sharpness softens. The jaw unclenches.

The permanent crease between his brows smooths out, and what’s left under is just a man, exhausted and bruised and trusting someone enough to close his eyes in a room with a door.

I run my fingers through his hair one more time and lean down and press my lips to his temple and

whisper, “Time to wake up, my love.”

Nothing. The man sleeps like the dead.

“Knox.”

There comes a grunt. His arm tightens across my thighs.

“Knox, we have seventeen hours. Well, eleven now. You slept through six of them.”

His eyes open, and they’re blue. Such clear, beautiful blue. The first thing they do is find my face, and the

second thing they do is soften in a way that makes my chest hurt in a good way.

“You stayed,” he says, voice rough with sleep.

“Where else would I go?”

“You stayed awake.” His thumb brushes my cheek. “The whole time?”

“Someone had to count the ceiling cracks. You stopped at four hundred and twelve. I got to six hundred and thirty–seven. Your methodology was sloppy.”

He manages a small laugh, then pushes himself up slowly, wincing at the stiffness from sleeping in one position for six hours, and his hand finds my face before he’s fully upright.

His thumb is on my cheek, eyes scanning me with that obsessive attention that feels like a graze of

sunlight after an ice–cold night.

“Have you eaten?”

“I was watching you sleep, Knox. I wasn’t going to get up and rummage through a dead man’s pantry while

CHATTERARY LATKINT

you were using me as a mattress.”

“You should have eaten.”

“You should have slept three days ago. We’re both terrible at self–care. It’s one of our many shared qualities.”

The corner of his mouth lifts in a small smile, and he rolls his eyes.

We make our way to the kitchen and discover that Queenie has been awake for hours. The kitchen is warm, and there’s coffee made and something that smells like eggs and toast and the kind of domesticity that has no business existing in the home of a man Knox killed hours ago, but here we are.

Queenie is at the stove with her back to us, and when she hears our footsteps, she goes rigid and turns slowly.

Her eyes are swollen from crying, and she’s wearing one of Nathaniel’s shirts, and she looks at me the way you’d look at a land mine you’re not sure is armed.

“I made breakfast,” she says carefully. “If you want it.”

Knox opens his mouth, probably to say something cutting, and I elbow him in the ribs. He grunts.

“Thank you, Queenie,” I say. And I mean it.

It seems to mean something to her, because her face lights up.

While it’s not forgiveness, it’s acknowledgement that the woman who betrayed me also spent the night

making eggs so we wouldn’t face the worst conversation of our lives on empty stomachs, and that has to

count for something.

We eat at the counter side by side. Knox’s knee against mine, his free hand on my thigh between bites, his

body oriented toward me even when he’s facing his plate.

He eats like food is a concept he’s just been reintroduced to, which is probably accurate given that his last

meal was stale crackers nineteen hours ago.

I steal a piece of his toast. He notices immediately.

“Did you just take my toast?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Ember, I watched you do it. My toast was there, and now it’s in your hand.”

“This is my toast. I’ve always had this toast.”

“You are a menace and a thief, and I love you beyond all reason.”

“I know. More coffee?”

Queenie makes a sound from the stove that might be a laugh.

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