TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 305

CHAPTER 234: A BRAVE DAY

EMBER’S POV

I can see everything from where I’m pinned in the kitchen. The hallway is short – bathroom, bedroom, storage room at the end, the door hanging open.

Maurice is inside the room. I can see his back, his body positioned between the doorway and where Gale is chained, and in his hand is a kitchen knife that he grabbed from the drawer on his way through.

His hands are shaking so badly that the blade is catching the light in irregular flashes.

Harrison reaches the doorway and stops. He looks past Maurice at Gale, who is pressed against the wall as far as his chains will allow, wild–eyed, tear–streaked, the pathetic desperation of a man who has just realised his father didn’t come here to rescue him.

“There you are.” Harrison’s voice carries down the hallway to where I’m pinned, and the sound of it is the worst thing I have ever heard because it’s CALM. Conversational, almost. Like he’s greeting his son at a holiday dinner and not standing in a doorway with a loaded gun. “Look at you, Gale. What a picture.”

“Dad, please.” Gale’s voice breaks on the first syllable and keeps breaking. “Please, I’m sorry, I can change, I’ll do whatever you want, I’ll marry again, I’ll be who you need me to-”

“Enough.” Harrison raises the pistol.

The barrel levels at Gale past Maurice’s shoulder, and Maurice shifts to block it, this trembling wreck of a

man putting his body between a gun and the person behind him with the specific, desperate courage of

someone who has never been brave before and is learning how it works in real time.

“Move, Maurice,” Harrison says, the way you’d tell a dog to get off the couch. “This doesn’t concern you.

You’ve been a good man, and I’d hate to empty your brains before your daughter.”

“It’s my house, and you have no right on these grounds! I should never have let you in here years age, and I don’t plan to let you take another step forward now!”

Harrison chuckles. It is a dry, ice–cold sound that barely disturbs the air.

“Who would have thought there’d come a day when a cowering fool like you would finally stand up to me?” Harrison tilts his head, his gaze flat and dead. “And for what? My excuse for a son? You failed your own child, yet somehow you believe yourself worthy to defend mine? Tell me, Maurice–how does that work?”

For a second, Maurice wavers.

His grip on the knife falters for a second, and I can see the words landing where Harrison aimed them – in the soft, unhealed centre of a man who knows exactly how badly he failed.

Then his teeth grit and something hardens behind his eyes.

“I am making myself the man I should have been years ago,” Maurice says, his voice losing its shake,

CHAPTER 224&RPAMET

replaced by a low, steady anger. “I can’t say the same about you, Harrison. You have always been a sadistic vulture. And from one failure of a father to another–you should be ashamed of yourself. You made that boy into a monster, and now you want to punish him for simply existing.”

Harrison blinks. The insult doesn’t even leave a scratch on his calm exterior.

“Touching,” Harrison says softly, his voice devoid of all ernotion. He raises his pistol a fraction of an inch, aiming dead centre at Maurice’s chest. “I will only say this one last time, Maurice. Move.”

“No.”

What is he doing?!

“Dad!” The words rip out of my chest, more desperate than I’d have chosen. “Get out of his way! This is not the time to play hero. He is a psychopath!”

“Listen to your girl, Maurice. I have a reputation around here.”

“I’m sorry, Ember. But I’m not moving. Not this time. You want to shoot your son, you fucking bastard? You do it through me. And you do it knowing that the woman at the other end of this hallway is watching you, and she will never forget what she sees, and she will carry it for the rest of her life the same way I’ve carried every failure of mine. So you go ahead, Harrison. Pull that trigger. Add my body to the pile. But

don’t you dare pretend you’re doing something noble. You’re killing a chained man who can’t fight back

because you’re ashamed of who he loves, and that makes you the weakest person in this room.”

The silence that follows lasts two heartbeats.

Harrison merely chuckles, pulling his trigger finger.

But then Maurice lunges first.

He drives the knife forward, aiming for Harrison’s gun arm – his only arm.

The blade finds flesh and sinks in.

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