TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 290

CHAPTER 291: DO I LEAVE?

EMBER’S POV

I drive.

It’s a small thing, maybe nothing to anyone watching, but my hands on the steering wheel feel like reclamation.

For weeks, other people have driven me places. Knox carrying me through hallways, Nathaniel behind the wheel of getaway cars, Rafael’s guards hauling me through forests.

I’ve been a passenger in every sense of the word, moved from location to location by men who decided where I needed to be and when I needed to be there.

Today I drive.

The Alaskan highway stretches flat and white and endless ahead of us, and Queenie is in the passenger seat with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes fixed on the treeline, as if the snow–covered pines hold

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a clever secret.

We haven’t spoken since pulling away from the compound. Knox’s goodbye is still warm on my lips, and a silver bullet gun is in the glovebox because trouble, Knox reasoned, has a GPS lock on my location, and. he’d rather I carry something lethal.

I didn’t argue. He’s not entirely wrong. If Gale somehow tries to pull an attack, I’d need to defend myself.

Five minutes. Ten. The silence in the car is thick enough to stand on.

“I missed you,” Queenie says finally, and her voice is small and stripped of everything except the truth under it. “Every day since the recording. I missed you so much it felt like losing a limb. Like, there was a whole section of my life that went dark, and I couldn’t turn the lights back on, no matter what I did.”

I keep my eyes on the road. The windshield wipers push snow in slow arcs, and I count three of them before I respond.

Γ

“Did you know everything Nathaniel knew?”

“No.” The word comes out fast and firm, and I can tell she’s been waiting for this question, rehearsing her answer in the shower and the kitchen and every moment in between. “Nathaniel has always had his head full of theories and worst–case scenarios and contingency plans for contingency plans. He keeps me out of most of it because he knows I’d never go along with half the things he does.” She pauses. “I knew about the recording. I knew about the journal in which he was documenting Knox’s behaviour. I knew he believed your bloodline was dangerous in some way he couldn’t fully explain. But the rest of it? The Celeste thing? The children? The things he told you this morning?” Her voice breaks slightly. “I didn’t know, Ember. I swear on my life, I didn’t know. And if I had, I would have gone straight to Knox myself because there are lines that love doesn’t cross, and what Nathaniel did to Celeste is so far past those lines I can’t even see them from where we’re standing.”

PRACTERA PATEL AVE

I believe her, not because I want to, though I do, but because i know Queenie.

I know the way she lies, which is badly and with too much eye contact, and I know the way she tells the truth, which is messily, with tears, and with the particular brand of guilty honesty that makes her impossible to stay angry at even when anger is the appropriate response.

“Everything he does,” Queenie says, quieter now, “he genuinely believes he’s doing for Knox. That doesn’t make it right. That doesn’t make it forgivable. But it makes it… I don’t know. Human. In the way that terrible things are sometimes human when you can see the love under them, even when the love is causing damage.”

“Love that causes damage is still damage, Queenie.”

“I know. Believe me, I know. I’m married to the man.” She almost laughs, and the sound catches halfway, becoming something wetter. “I married a man who loves his Alpha so much he’ll burn down the lives of everyone around him to keep that man alive, and I knew that going in, and I chose it anyway, and I don’t know what that makes me.”

“It makes you someone who understands messy love.” I glance at her sideways. “Which is more than most people can say.”

The road stretches. Miles of nothing. White and grey, and the occasional dark shape of a moose or a fence post breaking the monotony.

“You saved my life,” I say, and the words have been sitting in my chest since the compound, since the car that Nathaniel drove through a pack of wolves while Queenie shielded my body with hers and told me to shut up and let her protect me for once. “At Rafael’s compound. You came for me when I had told you to never contact me again. You put your body between me and a car crash, and you didn’t even hesitate.”

Queenie wipes her face with the back of her hand.

“You think I could have stayed away? You think there’s any version of this where I hear you’re in trouble and I just sit in a cabin and do nothing?” She turns to look at me, and her eyes are blazing and wet. “Ember, you’re my person. You were my person before Nathaniel began this whole madness. You were my person before the lies, and before any of this. I know we only met for a few days, but I did like you. I believe you to be phenomenal, and any woman who can withstand the force of Knox Volkov’s attention is one I will die respecting. Screwing up doesn’t change that. It just means I have to work harder to earn the right to say it.”

I don’t say “I forgive you” because I’m not there yet, and saying it before I mean it would be its own kind of lie, and we’ve all had enough of those.

But something loosens in the space between us. Like an exhale. The first thread of a bridge being thrown across a gap that’s too wide to jump but not too wide to build over, given time.

The silence that follows is different from the one we started with. Warmer. Still bruised, but breathing.

Then Queenie says, quieter, almost to herself:

“Do you think I should leave him?”