TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 284

CHAPTER 213: THE COMPOUND

EMBER’S POV

Knox makes a sound. A low and guttural sound coming from somewhere deeper than his chest, somewhere that lives in the spine and the blood and the ancient lineage of what he is.

His hand on my hip goes rigid.

“But here’s the part I can never undo.” Nathaniel’s voice is breaking now. “Celeste agreed to the test. She agreed because she loved you, and she wanted you cured because she believed your distance could be fixed if the feral gene was gone. She would have done anything I asked if I told her it would fix the gene. If it would make you feel closer to her at heart. But Celeste had her own-” He stops and clears his throat. She had her own feelings about Kieran. Feelings she’d been navigating for months. Feelings I KNEW about and used as leverage because a scenario with genuine chemistry would be more convincing than a purely staged one.”

All breaths are held.

“To the best of my knowledge,” Nathaniel continues, barely above a whisper, “the test was supposed to be

contained. An appearance. A provocation that I could control. But what I set in motion and what actually happened in that bedroom before Knox arrived were not-” His voice breaks. “Celeste was not entirely performing. And Kieran was not entirely pretending. They had the opportunity, and they fucked like rabbits with it. By the time Knox walked through that door, what he saw was not a manufactured scene. It was-”

“Stop.” This is from Queenie, who is standing now, her hands balled into fists at her sides. “You engineered this? You deliberately triggered a feral episode? You KNEW what the gene could do, you’d been DOCUMENTING it for years, and you pointed it at a room full of people on CHRISTMAS EVE?”

“The compound was supposed to-”

“What compound?” Knox’s head turns slowly toward Nathaniel, and the slowness is infinitely worse than speed. “What. Compound.”

Nathaniel closes his eyes. When he opens them, whatever was left of his composure is gone.

“The morning of the Christmas gathering. I put something in your coffee.” Each word falls from his mouth like a stone dropping into deep water. “A metabolic accelerant. Designed to lower the feral threshold temporarily, to make the gene more… responsive. More reactive to emotional triggers. I wanted a clean result, Knox. I wanted a definitive answer. If the mate bond could hold you even with the gene running hot, then I’d have proof that the bond was the cure. Proof I could build a treatment protocol around.”

Nobody breathes. No one can breathe, because what Nathaniel just said is so monstrous in its implications that the mind needs a moment to fully assemble the picture.

He drugged Knox. The morning of the Christmas party. Chemically lowered the threshold of the feral gene. Then staged a scene designed to trigger maximum emotional distress. In a house with ninety guests,

SAFEYM, IN ta

twenty–two staff, fourteen guards, and two children sleeping upstairs with a nightlight because the little one was afraid of the dark.

“You drugged me,” Knox says, and his voice is the quietest it has been all morning. “You put something in my coffee to make the gene MORE volatile. And then you staged my wife fucking my best friend. In a house full of people.”

“The team was supposed to intervene before-

“SIXTY–THREE PEOPLE, NATHANIEL”

91

The roar shakes the room, and Knox’s head snaps sideways with a violence that has nothing to do with

anger and everything to do with pain.

His hand flies to his temple, and the groan that tears out of him is physical, something inside his skull

cracking against the wall it’s been sealed behind for ten years.

“Knox?” I grab his face. “Knox, what’s-”

“I can see it.” His voice comes out strangled, eyes squeezed shut, fingers digging into his own skull. “I can

– there’s fragments. The door was open. The bedroom. Candles. Why were there CANDLES, Nathaniel?”

–

“Knox, the suppressant is-”

“WHY WERE THERE CANDLES?”

“Because Celeste set them up. She was trying to make the scenario believable. The candles, the wine, the

Another strike. Knox jackknifes forward in the chair/nearly throwing me off his lap, and the sound that comes out of him is something between a scream and a snarl, and his eyes fly open, and they’re GOLD, blazing, flickering between gold and blue like a signal being jammed.

“I remember the SMELL.” His voice is raw and broken. “Her perfume and something else. Someone else. On our sheets. On our BED. And she was – she was saying something, she was trying to EXPLAIN-”

His body convulses. Another memory breaking through–and this one is worse because I can SEE it on his face–not the bedroom anymore. What comes after the bedroom.

“The hallway.” His breathing is ragged, his eyes unfocused, staring at something none of us can see. “I’m in the hallway, and there’s – the walls are – there’s blood on the walls already, and I don’t know whose it is, and I can hear SCREAMING-”

“Knox-” I grip his face tighter, but he’s somewhere else now, somewhere ten years ago, and the memories are pouring through the cracks in whatever dam Nathaniel built, and there’s no stopping them.

“The ballroom.” His voice drops to something barely human. “I’m in the ballroom, and they’re running. All of them. The guests, the staff, everyone running and the SOUND of it, the sound of that many people screaming at once-” His hands go to his head, and he grips fistfuls of his own hair. “A woman in a red dress. She was trying to get to the door, and I – and she-”

He gags, his body rejecting the memory the way you’d reject poison, and I hold onto him because if I let go, he’ll fall, and if he falls, I don’t know if he’ll get back up.

“The children.” A whispernow. So quiet I almost miss it. “The children were upstairs. They were HIDING. Under the bed in the guest room. With the nightlight still on.” His eyes are streaming, and the gold is blazing, and his voice is fracturing into pieces that don’t fit together anymore. “They were hiding under the bed, and I found them. I FOUND THEM. And the little one, the boy, he was holding his sister and telling her to be quiet, to stop crying, that the monster would go away if they were quiet enough-”

“Stop.” My own voice and I’m crying now too, I can feel the tears on my face, but I can’t wipe them because both my hands are on Knox’s jaw, holding his face, holding him HERE, in this room, with me.” Knox, come back. Come BACK.”

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