TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 295

CHAPTER 224: PERMANENT

EMBER’S POV

“The last visit was different. You were about six. The woman watched you playing in the yard through the kitchen window for a long time without speaking. Then she told your mother the drops weren’t holding the way they used to. That you were getting stronger and the doses couldn’t keep up.” He sets the mug down. “She gave your mother something different. She called it permanent. Said it would ensure you never felt your wolf again – at least long enough for Devika to live out the rest of her life without worrying about her past catching up with her.”

“Permanent,” I repeat, and the word tastes like rust.

“Your mother cried when she took it. That’s the only time I ever saw Devika Chamberlain cry.”

“Did anything ever happen after that? Any episodes, anything that made you think the suppressants weren’t holding?”

Maurice thinks. “You were about twelve. You had a nightmare. A bad one. You screamed with pain in your sleep, and every wolf in the neighbourhood started howling at the same time. The howling went on for twenty minutes. Your mother was white as a sheet the entire next day. She doubled whatever she was giving you after that.”

Sapphire stirs in my chest at the memory. Not a memory I have access to, but something she recognises, something that lives in the wolf’s archive of suppressed moments.

“And when I was seventeen? Before the marriage?”

“By then I was too far gone to notice much of anything.” The shame in his voice is a living thing. “But I remember your mother being more anxious than usual. Rushing the arrangement with Harrison. I thought it was about money, about status, about her usual schemes. Looking back, I think she was trying to get you out of the house before something happened. Before you got old enough or strong enough for the permanent to wear off.”

Queenie shifts beside me. I can feel her attention sharpening, her brain filing every detail for the conversation we’ll have in the car afterward.

“The woman,” I say. “Did she ever say who she worked for? Who sent her?”

“No. But there was something i noticed.” Maurice stands, crosses to a drawer by the stove, and rummages through it. He comes back with a scrap of paper and a pencil and draws with shaky concentration. “The car had a symbol on the door. And the woman wore it too- on a pin, on her collar. I saw it every time she came. I never asked what it meant because honestly I didn’t want to know.”

He slides the paper across the table.

The drawing is awful. Barely legible. A crooked circle with what might be a crown or might be antlers, and beneath it a shape that could be a wolf or could be a smudge.

But something about it even rendered this badly by a man whose hands haven’t been steady in a decade- sends a cold current through my chest that makes Sapphire stir.

I stare at the crest. I don’t recognise it. But my wolf does. Somewhere in the part of me that Sapphire occupies, something old and buried responds to this symbol, and the response is not warm.

“That’s the best I can do from memory” Maurice says. “I’d suggest asking your mother, but not a single word from that woman’s mouth has ever been true, so you’d just be building on sand.”

I look at this man. At the gaunt face and the trembling hands and the clean kitchen that’s trying so hard to be worthy of a visitor who might never come.

At the sawdust still clinging to his jeans from the project on theporch – a man who woke up this morning and sanded wood because his hands needed purpose and his mind needed quiet, and nobody was coming to give him either.

He withdrew from me because my blood wasn’t his. Because my existence was a daily reminder that the woman he loved had used him as a decoy.

Because whatever I carried in my veins scared him in ways he couldn’t articulate and he coped the only way he knew how, which was not coping at all, which was absence, which was the slow erasure of himself through alcohol until the man who called me Birdie and taught me to count was just a shape on a sofa that sometimes remembered my name.

I thought it would hurt more, hearing it all confirmed.

I thought the truth would split something in me the way my fight with Knox did, the way Rafael did, the way watching Knox learn about Celeste this morning did/

But instead what I feel is something quieter and more complicated. Something that isn’t forgiveness but

lives in the same neighbourhood.

Understanding.

I understand now why the distance came when it did. Why the warmth switched off. Why the man who

carried me on his shoulders at the park stopped meeting my eyes at the dinner table.

It was never because I was unlovable. It was because HE was broken in a way that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with a lie my mother told and a truth he couldn’t digest.

It doesn’t make it okay. Nothing makes it okay. A child doesn’t need to understand WHY their parent

disappeared. They just need the parent to stay.

But I am not a child anymore.

And the woman sitting in this kitchen has loved and lost and fought and bled and discovered that the world is full of people who do terrible things for reasons that make sense inside their own heads, and the ability to hold both truths at once he failed me AND he loved me is something I’ve seen too many

times too soon.

The tea is cold in my hands, and my father is looking at me with watery eyes.

I can see the next wave forming – the apologies, the grovelling, the “I’m so sorry Birdie” speech he’s been rehearsing since I walked through the door.

“Don’t,” I say, before he can start. “I know you’re sorry. You told me at the dinner, and you’re telling me now and I believe you. But I am too exhausted for another round, Dad. I have had more revelations in the last twelve hours than most people get in a lifetime and my capacity for processing paternal guilt is at zero.”

Maurice closes his mouth, nods, and accepts it with quiet resignation.

“There’s something else I need to see before I leave,” I say. “Gale. Where is he?”

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