TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 300

CHAPTER 229: THE SAME ANIMAL

KNOX’S POV

The words land in my chest, and I feel the bruise of them immediately.

Twenty years of unwavering loyalty.

Twenty years of placing himself between me and danger by any means necessary, through near–deaths and battles and the kind of thankless service that never makes it into the history books.

My jaw tightens. I force myself to feel nothing. Not an inch of mercy. Not a drip of care.

Because this is the man who’drugged my coffee and killed my wife and murdered sixty–three people and documented me like a lab animal and lied to my face for a decade.

But he is also the man who committed his life to my family’s legacy.

The man I considered my brother long before any of this, back when life was simpler and the worst days could be solved with a bottle of beer after brutal training and shared laughter that meant nothing and everything at the same time.

Both things. At the same time.

I don’t honour the confession with a response.

I harden the bruise the way you harden a bruise, by pressing on it until the pain becomes familiar, the familiar becomes bearable, and the bearable becomes the thing you carry without comment, because carrying things without comment is what Volkov men do.

We drive in silence. The warehouse appears ahead. Grey concrete against white snow.

I open the door.

“I don’t like this,” Nathaniel says, and the worry in his voice is genuine and reflexive. “You’re walking into a

building alone with a man who has nothing left to lose. You have no weapon, no backup-”

“I have you. Whatever you’ve got in the boot of this car and forty metres of line of sight.” I step out. The cold hits my face, and the silver–clean air fills my lungs, and I feel more awake than I have in a while.” Thirty minutes. If I’m not out, come in ”

“Knox.”

I stop. Half–turned. His face in the car window, battered and bruised and carrying the expression of a man who wants to say something enormous and knows he’s lost the right.

“Thirty minutes, Nathaniel.”

I close the door and cross the lot.

My boots crunch on frozen gravel, and the sound is the only thing in the world besides my own breathing.

CHAPTER 40 SAME ANIMAT

The warehouse entrance is a rusted side door that groans when I push it open, and the interior smells like uld concrete and diesel.

Logan is already there.

He’s sitting on an overturned crate in the centre of the empty floor, surrounded by nothing. Just like me, he has no weapon or backup.

The circles under his eyes are deep enough to cast shadows. His clothes are the same ones from our last encounter – wrinkled and stained at the cuffs.

His hands are steady, but the steadiness is costing him everything

I know that look. I wore it for hours in that room while Ember was unconscious, and I counted ceiling cracks because counting was the only thing keeping me from tearing the walls down with my hands.

We are the same animal, Logan and I.

The same desperate, devoted, irrational species of man who would dismantle civilisation for the person we love and feel righteous about it afterwards.

I hate that I recognise it. I hate that looking at him is like looking into a mirror angled slightly wrong.

“You came alone,” he says. His voice is gravelly and exhausted.

“As agreed.”

“I need more than agreed.” He reaches behind the crate and produces something that makes Phantom go very still inside my skull.

It’s a restraint.

Rather, a Lycan containment device the kind they use in maximum–security facilities for transporting feral prisoners.

A wrist–to–forearm sheath, industrial–grade, lined on the interior with pure silver threading made so densely it looks like chainmail. There are two interlocking bands connected by a reinforced hinge.

And in Logan’s other hand, a small remote trigger, no bigger than a car key.

“Left arm,” Logan says. “It sits dormant during our conversation. It comes with a low burn, dulled senses,

nothing a big bad Lycan like you can’t handle. But if I feel threatened-” He holds up the remote. “Full

activation. It would trigger a total sensory shutdown. You’ll be on the floor for hours.”

I stare at the device.

The silver gleams under the warehouse’s failing fluorescents, and Phantom snarls at the sight of it because every wolf instinct I possess is screaming that putting this thing on my body is the worst idea I’ve had since letting Nathaniel make my coffee.

But the flash drive is out there. And Logan is the only path to it.

CHAPTER 23 THE ANIMA

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify