TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 302

CHAPTER 231: THE PHONE CALL

KNOX’S POV

Whatever just happened to Gale – wherever he is, whatever is being done to him right now in a storage room in a shabby house where I put him – Logan FELT it. Through whatever bond they share.

My phone buzzes in my jacket. The vibration travels through the silver haze like a distant drum.

Logan hears it too.

His head snaps toward my pocket with the speed of a predator acquiring a target, and I see the calculation happen behind his wild, bloodied eyes.

Faster than thought, faster than language, the rapid–fire processing of a desperate man assembling a plan from broken pieces.

His hand moves to his pocket. The remote.

“Logan, wait-”

He presses it.

The silver DETONATES. Every thread in the restraint ignites simultaneously, and my entire nervous system goes dark like a city losing power in a storm.

My muscles lock. My legs fold. I hit the concrete floor face–first, and the impact splits my lip, but I barely feel it because the silver is everywhere in my blood, in my bones, in the spaces between my thoughts.

And Phantom doesn’t just retreat, he VANISHES. Like someone reached into my skull and ripped my wolf

out by the roots.

I can’t move. I can see the ceiling, the flickering fluorescents, the grey concrete walls.

I can hear, faintly, through the silver static, Logan’s ragged breathing and the phone buzzing again in my

jacket pocket.

But my body is a prison. Every limb dead weight. Every muscle is locked in a paralysis so complete that

even my fingers won’t respond.

Logan is on me.

I feel his hands – rough, shaking, desperate – tearing through my jacket, finding the phone, pulling it free.

The screen is bright in my peripheral vision, and I can see the name: QUEENIE.

He answers.

And through the silver haze, through the static and the pain and the paralysis, I hear it. Queenie’s voice.

The specific pitch of a woman in the middle of something terrible. And under her voice, other sounds.

Someone else is crying, wailing at an inhumane pitch. Ember?

CHAPTER ZA** THE PHONE CALL

Logan stares at the phone. At the screen. At whatever location data Queenie’s call is transmitting.

His bloodied mouth moves silently – memorising an address, coordinates, something.

Then he’s gone, phone still in his hand.

He springs off me and makes it three strides before the shift takes him – mid–sprint, mid–stride, his body rearranging itself in the brutal, graceless way that wolves shift when they’re past caring about the elegance of it.

In a blink, Logan is gone. My phone is gone. The warehouse is empty except for me, the fluorescent lights, the overturned crate, and the silence that fills the space.

I am alone.

My left arm is encased in silver. My body is paralysed.

I have no phone, no way to contact Ember, no way to warn her that Logan is running toward her location in a state of feral madness.

But I can think. The silver dulls the senses and kills the shift, but it doesn’t touch the mind, and my mind is very, very clear right now in the way that minds become clear when the person you love is in danger.

First, the restraint. My wrist is wider than standard. The sheath is tight. The lock mechanism is located at the wrist joint, with no key access from the interior.

But the sheath has a gap. A narrow channel where the two interlocking bands meet at the hinge. Not wide enough for a large hand.

But if the hand were smaller. If the bones were compressed. If the thumb was no longer in its socket and

the wrist was no longer intact.

I don’t think about it. Thinking about it would introduce hesitation, and hesitation is a luxury I do not have because Ember might be in trouble.

I brace the silver sheath against the concrete, find the hinge, and jam my thumb against the gap.

Then I wrench.

My thumb goes first. A wet, grinding pop echoes in my teeth as the joint separates. Next, the wrist.

I twist against the metal with every ounce of strength my paralysed body can muster. Pain–extraordinary and mind–numbing–becomes my only fuel.

I feel the bones compress and shift; a slow, agonising crunch as my hand narrows to fit the opening.

Blood follows, lubricating the passage. With one final, inhuman pull, I tear free. The sheath clatters to the floor–the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.

Phantom floods back.

A tidal wave of my beast pours into every nerve, lighting up my senses as the silver’s hold breaks.

CHAPTER–ANE PHONFLE

First, my hearing: my own ragged breath and boots on distant gravel. Then, my smell: the copper of my blood and Logan’s lingering scent on the cold Alaskan air.

I push up with my right hand. My left is a ruin–shattered, dislocated, and flayed. It looks like a medical horror. I look away.

My legs are shaking, the silver residue still clinging to my muscles like a film, but they hold.

I stagger across the warehouse, my gait growing steadier as Phantom burns through the remaining paralysis. The wolf is caged no longer.

I burst through the door and onto the frozen gravel. Nathaniel is already sprinting toward me from the distant building; he must have sensed something was amiss.

His eyes drop to my mangled wrist, then snap to my face. He doesn’t need to ask.

“Get the car,” I say. “Now!”

Comments

LUCK DRAW