TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 303

CHAPTER 232: GET DOWN!

EMBER’S POV

Nobody moves.

The six arrows point at the house, and Harrison stands before them with his one remaining arm raised, and the silence that follows his words is not the kind that invites a response.

“Thirty seconds,” Harrison says. “Bring him out, or my men come in.”

I back away from the window.

My phone is on the kitchen counter where I left it beside the cold tea, and Queenie’s is in her jacket pocket, and Knox is an hour away at minimum doing whatever Knox is doing with Logan.

Even if I could reach him right now, he would arrive to a house full of arrows and dead bodies.

Calling Knox is not a plan that would work right now. Even by some miracle, we’d all be dead before he arrives.

“Everyone away from the windows,” Maurice says, and there’s a quality in his voice I’ve never heard from him before. “When those arrows come, they’ll punch straight through the siding. This place is weathered and old, and I doubt it can do much to protect us against those reinforced arrows.”

He grabs my arm and grabs Queenie and pulls us both to the floor behind the sofa.

The ancient, sagging, ugly thing that has squatted in this living room since my childhood has never been good for anything except collecting dust and the smell of old cigarettes.

ressing us flat. “The bolts will come at chest height, head

“Stay low, below the window line,” he says,

height. They’re aiming to kill anyone standing.”

“How do you know that?” Queenie whispers.

“Because I spent fifteen years working for men who used crossbow formations on armoured vehicles, and

if they can punch through a car door, they can damn well punch through my living room wall.” He positions

himself between us and the window. “When they fire, there’ll be a reload window. Fifteen seconds, maybe

twenty, depending on the draw weight. Those are the seconds that count.”

I’m counting in my head. Harrison said thirty. We’ve already burned ten of them.

Fifteen seconds left. Ten.

I look at Maurice and Queenie, then the hallway that leads to the back of the house, where Gale Crawford is chained to a pipe behind a padlocked door, oblivious to the fact that his father has arrived with six crossbow men and a lifetime of homicidal disappointment.

Unfortunately for Harrison, I am not the girl from the ambush. I am not the woman who freezes. I am done

being the person things happen to

C CHAPTER ZACKET

Five seconds.

“When the arrows stop, we have fifteen seconds,” I say, and tny voice is steady in a way that surprises even me. “Queenie – outthe back dool, get to the car. The gun is in the glovebox, silver bullets. Don’t try to be a hero with it. Get the gun, circle to the east side of the house, and put one clean shot into Harrison. Take him out and his men lose their nerve, because hired soldiers don’t fight for a dead employer.”

Queenie’s eyes are enormous, but she nods, because she’s the woman who drove through a wolf pack to save me, and she doesn’t need to be asked twice

“Dad storage room. Unchain Gale. I don’t care what he is or what he’s done; Harrison is not executing a chained man in your house. Get him loose and get him to the tree line through the back. There’s enough cover between the yard and the ridge that-”

“I’m not leaving you up here alone, Ember.”

“You’re not arguing with me right now, Maurice.” I grab his face with both hands – this broken man, this failed father, this coward who just told me the truth about my entire life over mint tea – and I hold his gaze with everything I have. “Storage room. Gale. NOW. This is how you earn it, Dad. This is the brave thing.”

Something passes between us that I can’t name. Something that fills his eyes with understanding and mine with the smallest hint of moisture. He nods, firmly.

“I’ll keep Harrison focused on the front,” I say. “Buy time for both of-”

The arrows come.

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