TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 306

CHAPTER 235: THREE BODIES

EMBER’S POV

I’m fighting so hard against the men holding me that my shoulders feel like they’re going to dislocate.

I reach through to Sapphire with every ounce of willpower i have, I scream, and I thrash, but there is no release of the power we had at the Bacchanal. There is no release of strength or divine fury, or a miracle.

All there is the ugly stench of death.

I can see down the hallway into the storage room – Maurice on the floor, chest wound bleeding, his eyes open and blinking.

Gale slumped against the pipe, still, with two holes in his chest. Harrison is standing between them with blood running down his arm from where Maurice’s knife is still embedded.

He looks at what he’s done. His son’s body. The blood. The man gasping on the concrete beside him.

He looks up the hallway, and his eyes find mine, and what I see in them is not triumph or righteousness or

the cold satisfaction of a mission completed.

What I see is a man who just murdered his own child and is feeling the full, annihilating weight of that

reality land on him in real time.

“At least the Crawford shame dies here,” he says.

He puts the gun to his own temple and pulls the trigger.

The men holding me flinch.

All of them simultaneously, the collective recoil of trained soldiers processing something they weren’t prepared for, and their grips loosen for half a second.

That half–second is all I need.

I wrench free, and I’m down the hallway before anyone reaches for me again.

Past the bathroom, past the bedroom, into the storage room where the air is thick with gunpowder and blood and the sharp copper smell that coats the back of your throat.

Three bodies on the floor.

I go to Maurice. Not to Gale, not to Harrison. To the man who stood in a doorway with a kitchen knife and said “not this time” and meant it for the first and last time in his life.

He’s alive. His eyes are open, his chest is rising in shallow, wet intervals that tell me the bullet found something important.

The blood spreading beneath him is dark and steady and not slowing down. I drop to my knees and press my hands to the wound, and the blood is warm between my fingers.

CHAPTER 2 THREE BODIES

D Dad… Please. P–Please, you can’t do this now”

His face contorts with pain, but his eyes find mine, and the focus in them is fading but fighting.

“QUEENIE!” I scream it toward the kitchen. “CALL AN AMBULANCE NOW! CALL ANYONE!”

I can hear Queenie scrambling.

The men who held us are already leaving Harrison’s soldiers scattering through the exits they came from because their employer just put a bullet in his own head, and the contract died with him.

None of them is getting paid enough to linger at a crime scene.

Their boots are heading for doors and windows, the sound of a team evaporating.

Queenie is on her phone. I can hear her trying a number – ringing, ringing, nothing. She tries again. More

ringing.

Then she tries a third time, and someone picks up, and she’s screaming and crying, and the sounds of this

gutted house are pouring through the speaker. The call cuts almost immediately.

She tries emergency services next and gets through, sobbing the address between gasps, begging them to

hurry.

“I’m sorry, Birdie.” Maurice’s voice is a rasp that bubbles at the edges. His hand finds mine on his chest weak, blood–slicked, trembling, but there. “For everything. Should have… been this brave… twenty years

ago.”

“Shut up and stay alive,” I say, and I press harder because the blood is finding its way between my fingers no matter how tight I hold, and the frustration of it burns behind my eyes. “You don’t get to die doing the

first brave thing you’ve eve

done. That’s not how this works, Dad. You stay alive, and you earn the rest of

it.”

“You sound like her.” His mouth twitches, his words coming out thick and slow like they’re wading through something heavy. “Your mother. When she was… before the schemes and the… she had that same…” A wet cough interrupts whatever he was reaching for. “You got the best of her, Birdie. All the best parts and none of the… none of the bad.” His eyes are losing focus. “Always thought that was… a miracle.”

“I said shut UP, Dad.”

“I’m proud of you, Birdie. Should have… said it more. Should have said it every day.”

His fingers are losing their grip around mine, and my tears are unending now, blurring and ending my world all at once, inflicting an agony that is close to none.

Queenie’s voice comes from the kitchen – the ambulance is ten minutes out. Ten minutes.

I press harder on Maurice’s chest and count the seconds, and negotiate with a wound that is trying to take my father.

I am not finished needing him yet, not when he just earned the right to be needed, not when his

CHAPTER 28THREE BODIES

desperation to be brave has been worth more than years of apologies.

“Stay with me,” I whisper. “Please, Dad. I am begging you. If there is one time I need you to hold on, it’s now. Keep looking at me Right here. Don’t go anywhere”

His eyes hold mine. Fading, fighting, holding.

Then, a new sound cuts through Queenie’s sobs.

Claws on the kitchen floor.

Fast, heavy, and frantic. A wolf blows past Queenie with a desperate scramble.

It rounds the corner into the hallway–a massive, wild–eyed grey blur–and shifts mid–stride. It’s a brutal, bone–snapping transition.

Logan.

For a second, my heart drops in fear of danger. Where is Knox?

But Logan is naked, with blood drying at the corner of his mouth.

He doesn’t seem to see me. He doesn’t seem to see my blood–soaked hands pressing into Maurice’s

chest. He doesn’t even register Harrison’s corpse on the floor.

He only sees Gale.

He crosses the room in two strides and drops to his knees.

He gathers Gale into his lap–the heavy chains, the blood, the dead weight of him. Logan’s arms are shaking so violently that he can barely pull him close.

He cradles Gale against his chest like something precious. A phone slips from his grip, clattering uselessly

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