TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 298

CHAPTER 227: THE BOY AND THE DEER

KNOX’S POV

Nathaniel pauses for a moment, then nods once.

He offers no argument, rehearsed defence, or rationalisation.

No carefully worded explanation for why twenty years of service should outweigh sixty–three bodies and a drugged cup of coffee.

All I get is that nod

The absence of a fight from a man who has fought me on every decision I’ve made since I was seventeen

was the most damning part.

It is the silent admission that what he’s done has no defence, and any attempt to build one would insult us

both.

I stared out the window, and my mind did what it’s been doing all morning – reaching backwards, trying to reconcile the man beside me with every version of him I’ve known.

Because the Nathaniel in that living room this morning, confessing to engineering a massacre, is not the

Nathaniel I chose.

Not the one I found.

I was seventeen when I arrived in North America.

Seventeen, with my father’s blood still under my fingernails because the flight from Zürich was seven hours, and the airport bathroom soap wasn’t strong enough to get it all out.

I’d killed Alexei. I’d left my mother’s grave untended and Mathilde crying in a doorway and the Volkov estate hollow behind me, and I’d come to claim a crown that felt like a costume on a boy who should have

been in school.

They brought me a thousand candidates for beta. Lined them up in the training yard, each one polished and rehearsed and bowing so deeply their spines must have ached.

Sons of generals, sons of council members, sons of old bloodlines who’d served the Volkov pack for generations.

And at the end of the line, not bowing, was a boy about my age with no family name anyone recognised

Nathaniel didn’t care enough to bow.

He didn’t care to recite a speech about honour and legacy and the sacred duty of the beta oath.

He looked me straight in the face – the only one in a thousand who did – and said nothing.

I remember thinking: that one.

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But it wasn’t just the eye contact.

It was what I saw three days later during the tracking exercises standard training for aspiring pack warriors, in which live deer are released into the northern woods, and the candidates hunt them down in

coordinated teams.

Most catches win.

The deer are fast, panicked, scattering in every direction, and the exercise tests everything at once –

speed, instinct, teamwork, and the ability to communicate mid–chase without losing your target.

One of the deer went down hard, caught its leg on a root, fractured something, and couldn’t stand. A

downed deer doesn’t count as a catch.

It’s not a test of anything except whether you can walk past a broken animal and keep your eye on the ones still running, which is exactly what every other candidate did.

But from the ridge where I was watching, I saw Nathaniel stop.

He dropped out of formation entirely and knelt beside the animal in the mud. He took care of it – set the bone, wrapped it, stayed with the deer until it could stand on its own.

By the time he rejoined the pack, he was dead last. He’d thrown away his ranking for an animal nobody

else even noticed was hurt.

The trainers marked it as insubordination. They wanted him cut from the programme.

I overruled them, three days into my reign, seventeen years old, overruling military trainers who’d been running the programme since before I was born.

All because the boy who stopped for the deer was the one I wanted standing next to me.

It was unheard of. Possibly the first thing that marked me as a stubborn prick to most.

I didn’t want the Alphas‘ sons who ran the fastest or bowed the deepest or licked my ass for the longest

hours on end.

The boy I chose to be my Beta was the one who kneit in the mud and fixed something broken because fixing it mattered more to him than winning.

Where did that man go?

I know parts of the answer. I’ve always known parts.

Nathaniel came from nowhere no pack, no parents, no name that traced to anything. He’d been taken in by a physician. That much he’d told me.

I knew the physician. Not well he died long before I arrived in North America.

But I knew his name and his role: chief medical officer of the Volkov pack.

The man who treated my father’s gene on the North American side during the years when Alexei was still

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conducting pack business abroad, before the episodes became so bad that he permanently retreated to

Zürich.

I always assumed the physician was Nathaniel’s teacher. His mentor. The man who taught him medicine before Nathaniel abandoned the medical path and chose to fight instead.

That’s the story Nathaniel let me believe.

After the man died, Nathaniel said the research was useless, said he was done with medicine, said he

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