TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 296

CHAPTER 225: SURRENDER MY SON

EMBER’S POV

Maurice’s face shifts. A new layer of guilt settling over the existing ones, and I’m beginning to wonder how many layers this man carries before the whole structure collapses under the weight.

He stands and leads us through the house, past the bathroom where I used to lock myself during my parents‘ worst fights, past the bedroom where I’d press my face into the pillow and pretend the shouting was wind, to a door at the back of the house that I don’t remember being there when I was growing up.

A storage room reinforced and padlocked.

Maurice produces a key from his pocket and opens it.

The smell hits first. Stale air and unwashed body and something rotten under. The room is small and dim

and in the corner, chained to a pipe that runs along the floor, is Gale Crawford.

I almost laugh.

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He’s thinner than I remember. Unshaven, hollow–cheeked, wearing clothes that haven’t been changed in

longer than is decent.

His wrists are raw where the chains have rubbed and there’s a split in his lip that looks recent and a bruise along his jaw that looks even more recent than that.

He looks up when the door opens and the hatred that floods his face when he sees me is instantaneous and total and completely, laughably impotent.

“YOU BITCH! Your BOYFRIEND did this to me,” Gale spits. “Your precious Lycan King chained me up in your daddy’s closet like a fucking animal-

I study him.

He’s pathetic.

Genuinely, deeply pathetic, crouched on a concrete floor with chains around his wrists and fury in his eyes that has nowhere to go because the woman standing above him is no longer the girl he married and the world he knew has moved on without him.

I don’t feel rage. I expected rage. I WANTED rage, the satisfying, righteous kind that would make this encounter feel like closure.

What I feel instead is nothing. An absence so complete it’s almost disorienting, like reaching for something on a shelf and finding the shelf empty and clean, the object removed so long ago there isn’t even a dust outline.

Gale means nothing to me. The realisation is quiet and the most freeing thing I have ever felt.

“Why?” I ask Maurice, turning away from Gale mid–sentence because whatever he was saying doesn’t

warrant the energy of listening. “Why did you agree to this?”

Maurice straightens. Something shifts in his posture, subtle but unmistakable, and it takes me a moment to recognise it because I’ve never seen it on him before: resolve.

“Because I owed you.” His voice is steady for the first time since we arrived. “I spent years failing to protect you from everything. Your mother, the suppressants, Gale, myself. When Knox Volkov called and asked if I would hold the man who beat my daughter in a place where I could watch him, I said yes. And I’d say yes again.” His jaw tightens. “Also, he talks too much. And he’s rude about my cooking. So sometimes his dinner arrives late. By several hours.”

Queenie makes a sound behind me that she disguises as a cough.

Gale spits toward my feet. The saliva hits the concrete a few inches short.

Maurice moves before I process what’s happening. He steps forward and slaps Gale across the face with

an open palm, hard, the crack of it echoing off the concrete walls.

“You don’t spit at my daughter,” Maurice says, and his voice holds more steel than I have heard from him

in the entirety of my life.

Gale recoils, fresh blood joining the existing blood on his lip.

Maurice shakes out his hand, wincing, the hit clearly hurting him as much as it hurt Gale, and looks at me with an expression that asks – was that okay? Did I do it right? Is this what protecting feels like?

I stare at him and something inside me shifts. And for the first time in long, ugly awhile, I give him a smile.

“Let’s go upstairs,” I say softly.

We leave Gale in the dark. The door locks behind us. His shouting fades to muffled noise behind reinforced wood and I don’t look back because looking back is something I’m finished doing.

We return upstairs, and Queenie has gravitated to the kitchen because Queenie cannot exist in a kitchen without making something, and the kettle is back on and she’s found biscuits somewhere and the sight of her arranging them on a plate in this sad little kitchen is so absurdly domestic that it almost makes me

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smile.

Then Queenie’s voice from the front window, the biscuits abandoned, pitched high and sharp with a fear that drops my stomach through the floor:

“Guys. I think someone is here. I think we were followed.”

I cross to the window in four strides.

Harrison Crawford is stepping out of a black vehicle parked across the unpaved road, missing one arm. But he’s not alone.

Behind him, fanning out with the practised synchronisation of a trained unit, six men carrying crossbows move into position. All arrows are nocked, strings taut, and tips aimed at the house.

BEFLEAY BUN

The bitter memory of the time he launched his arrowed ambush at us returns. The moment he almost took Knox’s life.

My body remembers before my brain finishes processing and for three terrible seconds I am frozen, locked in place by a trauma response that doesn’t care how much I’ve grown or how strong I’ve become.

Then it passes. Because I am not the girl from the ambush. I am the woman who screamed Rafael’s compound apart and sat in a king’s lap while his world burned and drove herself to her father’s house with

a silver bullet gun in the glovebox.

Harrison stands in front of his men. He doesn’t approach. He doesn’t need to.

His face is calm in the way that truly dangerous things are calm – the stillness of a man who has driven

past negotiation and past reason and past anything that could be reached by words.

He looks at the house with aristocratic coldness.

He raises his one good hand, palm up. His men draw their bows in unison, the strings creaking in the cold

air, six arrowheads gleaming in the grey Alaskan light.

Then he speaks.

“By the order of the traditionalists. Surrender my deviant son. Or suffer a fate worse than his.”

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