TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 292

CHAPTER 221: SCREAM WITH ME

EMBER’S POV

Queenie doesn’t answer.

I glance over and she’s staring at the dashboard and tears are sliding down her cheeks in two clean lines and her mouth is pressed shut and she’s not making a sound.

She’s just sitting there, crying silently, and the silence is louder than anything she could have said because the answer is in the tears and the tears say no.

I don’t push. I don’t fill the quiet with comfort or platitudes.

I just let her cry, because sometimes that’s the kindest thing you

dan do.

After a while, she wipes her face, exhales, and straightens her shoulders the way women do when they’re putting themselves back together in real time.

“Well,” she says, her voice rough. “That was deeply unpleasant.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m going to need to think about some things.”

“Yeah.”

“But not right now. Right now I need to do something very stupid and very loud.”

I pull the car to the shoulder, and the engine idles in the quiet.

“Roll your window down,” I say.

“It’s minus ten degrees, Ember.”

“Roll your window down.”

She rolls it down. The cold rushes in and bites every exposed inch of skin, and I roll mine down too, and

the car fills with freezing Alaskan air.

“This is the point where we both scream,” say.

“Excuse me?”

“I have been swallowing so much weeks. Since before the Bacchanal, actually, since roughly the day I was born into this disaster of a bloodline. And if I don’t get them out before I walk into my father’s kitchen and have the conversation I’m about to have, I’m going to explode at his table and that’s not the version of this I want.” I grip the steering wheel. “So we’re going to scream. Right now. Into the wilderness. Like two unhinged women in a car on the side of an Alaskan highway, which is exactly what we are.”

Queenie stares at me. Then a grin breaks across her face, slow and incredulous and so deeply QUEENIE that my chest aches with how much I’ve missed it.

SCHAFEPR WITH MU

“On three?” she asks.

“On three. One, Two-”

We scream.

It’s such an ugly noise. Pure, ugly, primal, cathartic NOISE, pouring out of both of us through open windows into the vast indifferent Alaskan landscape that absorbs it without judgment.

I scream until my throat burns and my lungs empty, and Queenie is screaming beside me with her whole body, leaning out the window, her hair whipping in the cold wind, and somewhere in the distance, a wolf howls back like he’s answering us.

The howl sets us off. Queenie looks at me. I look at her. And we dissolve into the kind of laughter that lives in your stomach and uses your whole skeleton and hurts in the best possible way.

“Oh Goddess.” Queenie is gasping, wiping tears from her eyes that might be laughter or might be leftover grief. “I think that wolf just filed a noise complaint.”

“He’s probably calling his pack right now. Warning them about the two insane women in the sedan.” “Did that actually help?”

I consider. My chest feels lighter. My jaw is unclenched for the first time in hours.

My hands on the steering wheel are steady and sure and the screams I’ve been swallowing are now somewhere in the Alaskan atmosphere where they belong instead of lodged behind my ribs.

“Yeah,” I say. “It actually did. Did it help you?”

“Goodness gracious, I needed that. Can we roll the windows up now? I can’t feel my face.”

I roll the windows up and pull back onto the road, and we drive the rest of the way in a silence that is

entirely different from the one we started with. Warmer. Lighter. Not perfectly healed, but healing. And that

distinction matters.

The house appears through the trees, and my stomach drops before my brain catches up,

It’s smaller than I remembered, with weatherboard siding that was white once and is now the grey of

exhausted paint.

It has a porch that sags at one end an a yard that can’t decide if it’s lawn or wilderness and has compromised on something between the two.

My childhood home. The place where my mother drugged my food and my father drank himself into oblivion, and a girl named Ember Aragon learned to be quiet and small and invisible.

I hate this house. The feeling is immediate and visceral and I let it wash through me without trying to soften it because I’ve spent too many years softening things that deserve to be felt at full volume.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify