TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 307

CHAPTER 237: WAKE UP DAD!

KNOX’S POV

I turn my attention entirely to her, pulling her sparating focus to m

“I’m here. Look at me. Eyes on me, Ember I’m here I’m so sorry”

She looks at me, and the look breaks something in my chest that I didn’t know was 188

intact.

She’s been holding it together.

Through the arrows and the siege and the gunshots and the dying and the man the used be married to being executed in front of her, and her father taking a bullet that was meant someone else.

She’s been holding it all together because there was nobody here to hold it for her, and the walls she built to survive this moment are good, strong walls, the kind of walls you build when your childhood teaches you that falling apart is a luxury.

But I’m here now. And my presence is the permission she’s been waiting for.

Her face crumbles. The composure completely collapses, giving way to a rush of tears that violently shakes her entire body.

I pull her against my chest with my one working arm, holding her tight as years of suppressed grief and twelve hours of accumulated horror pour out of her.

I feel every wave of it deep in my own ribs.

I press my jaw hard into her hair, my voice cracking.

“I’m right here. I’m right fucking here. You hear me? You don’t have to hold it together for another second. Break. I’ll carry the rest.”

Under our hands, Maurice’s breathing changes. The shallow, wet intervals are slow. The space between them is growing.

Each breath further apart than the last, like a clock winding down, and I can feel through Ember’s body the moment she registers it — the stiffening, the head lifting from my chest, the eyes going to Maurice’s face with frantic attention.

“Dad. DAD. Open your eyes. You don’t get to do this, do you hear me? You stood up, you finally STOOD UP, and you think you can just – no. NO. Keep breathing. Keep your chest moving. I am not done with you, Maurice Aragon, you are not FINISHED. You owe me. You owe me twenty goddamn years, and you are not leaving until you’ve paid every single one of

237 WAKE UP DAD!

them, so BREATHE.”

His chest lifts one more time, drops with a heavy exhale, and never moves again

His hand goes limp against the concrete. His face goes slack. The wet breathing stops, replaced by a silence so complete I fear what comes next.

Maurice Aragon dies on the floor of his own storage room, his daughter’s hands pressed to his chest, and the Lycan King kneeling beside her.

The silence lasts for a single, suffocating heartbeat.

“No.” It slips out of Ember as a fractured breath. Her blood-soaked hands fist into his ruined shirt, and she shakes him-a sharp, violent jerk. “No, no, no! Maurice, look at me! You don’t get to do this! Wake up!”

I reach out, hooking my good arm around her waist to pull her back from the carnage.

“Ember. Stop. He’s-”

She violently thrashes against my grip, ripping herself out of my hold with a feral, terrified sob.

Throwing herself right back over Maurice, she grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him so aggressively his head snaps back against the concrete.

“I said wake up!” Her voice tears entirely at the edges, shattering into something gutted and desperate. “Please! Dad, please!”

When his head just lolls uselessly against the concrete, the realisation finally hits, and the sound she makes is one I will carry for the rest of my life.

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