TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 297

CHAPTER 226: KILLING HANDS

KNOX’S POV

My hands are the problem.

Not in the way Nathaniel would diagnose it, not the gene or the claws or the shift.

The problem is simpler and worse. I’m sitting in the passenger seat watching my fingers open and close around my own knee, and I cannot stop seeing them do other things.

The boy was holding his sister.

י

That’s the detail that won’t leave. Not the ballroom or the blood or the woman in the red dress whose face

I still can’t fully see.

The detail that followed me into this car is the boy.

Sabias. Seven years old, holding his sister Mira under a bed in a guest room with a nightlight still glowing because someone on my staff knew the child was afraid of the dark and cared enough to plug one in.

He was telling her to be quiet. That if they were quiet enough, the monster would leave.

The monster didn’t leave.

I flex my fingers against my knee. Open, close. Checking that the nails are blunt and human and that the things under them are not pressing through.

These are the same hands that held Ember’s face at sunrise and called her my love.

The same hands that will touch her tonight if she lets me, trace the curve of her jaw and the line of her throat and the places on her body she’s trusted me with despite every rational reason not to.

These hands killed children.

I am not sure how to live inside that sentence yet.

I’ve been living inside “I killed Celeste” for a decade, and it nearly destroyed me, and that was one person,

a man who found his wife with his best one death I could at least contextualise with betrayal and rage

friend and lost control.

It was terrible, but it was shaped. I could hold it.

Sixty–three is not shaped.

Sixty–three swallows everything around it and leaves you standing in a field with no walls and no horizon and no version of the story that makes you anything other than a man whose body committed a massacre while his mind was chemically absent and his beta watched from the next building with a clipboard.

And Ember’s dream. The one she told me about this morning, with her voice steady and her hands shaking and her eyes fixed on anything that wasn’t my face.

HELLO HANDS

How do you tell the man you love that you’ve seen him murder you in a prophetic vision? You don’t look at him while you say it. That’s how.

If I don’t fix this- the gene, the triggers, whatever Sapphire needs to become the anchor Nathaniel’s texts describe – it’s her next.

My claws, her chest, collarbone to hip. The woman who pulled me back from Nathaniel’s throat with her forehead against mine will be opened up by the same hands she trusted to hold her.

I flex my fingers again. Open, close. Human. For now.

Nathaniel drives the way Nathaniel does everything – with a precision so mechanical it borders on

parody. Both hands at ten and two.

I watch Anchorage pass through the window instead of speaking.

Gale Crawford’s face stares back at me from a telephone pole. Then another. Then the side of a bus

shelter.

‘MISSING. ALPHA GALE CRAWFORD. LAST SEEN IN ALASKAN TERRITORY. CONTACT PACK

AUTHORITIES WITH ANY INFORMATION.‘

They’ve put effort into the posters. Good photograph, flattering angle.

They’ve made him look like a respectable man instead of the pathetic, violent disgrace he actually is, because you can’t put “MISSING: WIFE–BEATER WHO WAS MANIPULATIVE AND ALSO A COWARD” on a poster and expect public sympathy.

The irony would be funny if I had the capacity for humour right now, which I don’t.

The most wanted man in Alaska is chained to a pipe in a storage room in the childhood home of the woman he abused for eight years, guarded by an alcoholic, and the entire North American pack infrastructure has been mobilised to find him.

A checkpoint appears ahead.

Security barricade, two pack guards in tactical gear flagging vehicles.

(*

Nathaniel slows the car and rolls down the window, and the guard leans in with the tired professionalism of a man who has been checking cars for hours and expects nothing from this one.

Then he sees me.

The change is immediate.

His spine straightens, his chin lifts, and the hand resting on his sidearm snaps to his chest in the formal pack salute.

The fatigue on his face is gone, replaced by the alert reverence I’ve been receiving from wolves since i was seventeen years old and have never once gotten used to.

CHAPTER READ ONES W

“Your Majesty.” He’s trying not to stammer. “We weren’t expecting – is there anything we can do? Do you need an escort?”

“At ease. We’re passing through.” I lean toward the window. “What’s the status on the Crawford search?”

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