TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 291

CHAPTER 220: HOW LOVE FEELS

EMBER’S POV

The question lands in the car like a third passenger.

I take my eyes off the road long enough to look at her and from her face, I can tell she is not fishing for reassurance or testing me.

She’s asking because she genuinely doesn’t know the answer and the not knowing is eating her from the inside.

“Queenie-”

“I know he’s my fated mate. I know the Goddess paired us. I know all the texts and the traditions and the lore that says this bond is sacred and chosen and meant to be. But the Goddess didn’t sit in that room this morning and listen to my husband confess that he drugged his best friend’s coffee and engineered a

woman’s death for research data.” Her hands are twisting in her lap, fingers pulling at each other. “How am

I supposed to lie next to him tonight knowing what he’s capable of? How am I supposed to let him touch

me and trust that the hands on my body belong to the man I married and not the man who stood in a

monitoring station while sixty–three people died?”

“I don’t have an answer for that.”

“I know you don’t. I just needed to say it out loud to someone who wouldn’t tell me I’m overreacting.” She leans her head against the window. “The worst part isn’t even the Celeste thing. The worst part is that I’m not surprised. That’s what makes me sick, Ember. I heard what he did this morning, and I was horrified, and I was furious, and underneath all of it there was this tiny voice that said ‘of course he did.‘ Because everything Nathaniel does, every breath he takes, every decision he makes, orbits Knox. Not me. Not our marriage. Knox.”

She swallows hard and the next part comes out like it’s been lodged in her throat for months.

“I can’t remember the last time we had sex.” A bitter laugh. “That’s embarrassing, right? A mated pair who can’t remember the last time they touched each other. But it’s true. I can’t remember the last time we did anything that didn’t have Knox in the middle of it. Every dinner conversation is about Knox’s gene. Every late night is Nathaniel hunched over research about Knox’s bloodline. Every argument is about what Nathaniel did or didn’t do for Knox. I am literally jealous of my husband’s boss and that is the most pathetic sentence I have ever spoken out loud.”

“It’s not pathetic.”

“It’s a little pathetic.”

“Okay, it’s a little pathetic. But it’s also valid. You married a man, Queenie, not a heroic cause or whatever Knox–obsessed ecosystem Nathaniel is building. And if the man you married has disappeared inside his role as Beta, you’re allowed to grieve that.”

MATT & SNOW WEIRS

“He’d marry his career if he could. If Knox asked him to choose between me and the Volkov legacy, I don’t know what he’d pick. And the fact that I don’t KNOW, after years of being his mate, after everything I’ve sacrificed to stand beside him…” She trails off. “Maybe that’s my answer. Maybe the not knowing IS the answer.”

I drive in silence for a while, letting her words settle, because they deserve space and they deserve to not be immediately fixed or softened.

Some truths just need room to exist.

“Can I ask you something?” Queenie says after a while. “Something personal.”

“Fair’s fair.”

“How did you know it was the right time to leave Gale? Like, when did you actually decide? Was it the moment you saw him cheating? Was it on the drive to the airport? Was it on the plane?”

I think about it. Really think.

“I think I decided years before I left. I think the decision was living inside me long before I had the courage

to act on it. The day I caught him cheating was just the weird validation. Maybe the universe giving me a

reason big enough to justify what I already knew.”

“And if he hadn’t been…” Queenie hesitates. “If you’d come home and there was no Logan or an orgy there.

If he wasn’t abusive. If he wasn’t gay. If he was just a man who didn’t love you very well. Would you have

stayed?”

The question catches me off guard because it’s one I’ve never let myself ask. The version of Gale who isn’t a monster. The version of a marriage that isn’t a crime scene.

The version that is just the slow erosion of two people who never fit.

“No,” I say, and the word surprises me with how steady it is. “I would have left anyway. Maybe not that night. Maybe not that year. But eventually. Because I know now what it’s supposed to feel like, and what I had with Gale wasn’t it. It wasn’t even close.”

“What does it feel like?” Queenie asks, and the hunger in her voice tells me everything about what she’s missing. “The real thing. What you have with Knox. What does it actually feel like?”

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