TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 299

CHAPTER 228: FIVE MINUTES LATE

KNOX’S POV

“No.”

“He raised you.”

“He saved me.” Nathaniel’s voice is stripped to the bone. “I was eleven. Living in the drainage tunnels under the old industrial district. Eating whatever I could steal. He found me during one of his community rounds – the pack clinics he ran in the low–income districts. I had a fever that should have killed me, and he brought me home and treated me for three weeks, and when the fever broke, he didn’t send me back to the tunnels.” A pause. “He gave me a bed. He gave me books. He gave me a name on medical forms and a place at his table, and he never once made me feel like a burden.”

I let that sit. This image of poor, sickly Nathaniel rearranges everything I thought I knew about him.

“His name was Petrov,” Nathaniel says. “And your father killed him.”

The air in the car vanishes.

For a second, the words pierce straight through my chest – not because they’re an accusation, because they’re not. There’s no blame in the way he says it.

His face gives nothing away. But the crushing weight of the sentence fills the car until the space between us feels too small, too tight, like the walls are pressing in.

“How?” I keep my voice level. Neutral. The voice of a king hearing information, not the voice of a boy whose father was a monster.

“During his last episode. Before he moved back to Zürich for good.”

Oh.

“What happened that night? The night my father killed him.”

Nathaniel’s jaw works. His knuckles go white on the wheel.

“I was supposed to be in the room. He was conducting a feral response assessment on Alexei – routine, he’d done dozens of them. I was his assistant in some sense. He never liked me being in the labs, but I always insisted. I thought learning something from him would give me a path to be someone worthy in society. That night, I was supposed to be standing by with the stabiliser ready in case Alexei’s readings spiked. That was my ONE job. Hold the compound and be ready.”

I hated the tension, the pain that laced those words. The undeniable tug of a bad feeling in my gut from where this was going.

“Then what happened?”

“I was late. Five minutes late. I’d been in the supply room preparing the dosage, and I miscalculated the

CHAPTER IRR FIVE VINUTES LATE

concentration and had to start over. By the time reached the examination room-” His voice breaks. “1

could hear it through the door. The sounds. His voice. He was trying to talk Alexei down the way he always did, calm and steady, and then Alexei’s readings must have spiked because I heard the table overturn and

then-”

He stops.

“There was no stabiliser in the room. That was my job. I was supposed to be standing there with it ready in my hands. When Alexei broke, Petrov had nothing. He went for the emergency supply on the back wall, the backup cabinet, and he had to turn away from Alexei to reach it. He turned his back for three seconds.” Another stop. “If I had been in position. Five minutes. If I had been there with the compound ready, he wouldn’t have needed to turn away. His hands would have been free. He might have-”

“He might have lived.”

“He might have lived. And your father might have been stabilised. And sixty–three people at a Christmas party might have grown old.” The words come out flat and terrible. “I was five minutes late, and it cost him his life, and I have spent every day since trying to finish what he started because that is the only way his death means something. Because if I solve this if I cure the gene – then he didn’t die for nothing. And the boy he pulled out of a drainage tunnel didn’t waste the life he was given.”

–

The highway rolls. Something tightens in my chest that I wasn’t expecting, because I don’t want to feel sympathy for this man right now, and my body is giving it to him anyway.

He blames himself. Not my father, the actual monster who did the killing.

Nathaniel blames the five minutes. The miscalculated dosage. The boy who wasn’t standing where he was supposed to be standing.

And that guilt turned him into the very thing Petrov was and let it consume him whole.

a man who fed his entire life to the Volkov gene

The journal entry, the compound, the engineered scenario, the very lines he crossed – all of it flowing from the same source.

A young boy standing outside a door listening to the only person who ever loved him die because he was five minutes too slow.

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