TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 309

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CHAPTER 239: BREATH OF LIFE

KNOX’S POV

Come back

I’m right here. I’m holding on.

Come back to me.

I need you.

I need you, or we both die in this room.

The temperature drops. Not suddenly, but in degrees, like a dial being turned slowly

The golden glow at Maurice’s chest pulses once, twice, three times, then begins to fade-the silver in Ember’s eyes thins, brown bleeding through like dawn coming up behind clouds.

The house stops shaking. The vibration in the floor subsides. The cracks in the ceiling stop spreading.

Ember takes a breath. A shuddering, gasping, broken inhale that tells me she’s back. She’s here.

She collapses against me, and the weight of her is the most precious thing I have ever held.

Her body shakes so violently I can feel it in my teeth. The silver vanishes from her eyes, leaving behind only Ember-exhausted, devastated, and covered in her father’s blood.

She presses her face into my chest, crying the way she has never let herself cry in front of me before.

She completely abandons her composure, surrendering to the ugly, wracking, full-body sobs of someone broken open by a grief too large to contain. She has finally, finally stopped trying to contain it.

I hold her with both arms. The broken wrist is screaming, I don’t care.

I would hold her with broken arms and broken legs and a broken spine if that’s what it took because this woman is my entire world, and she is falling apart, and the only thing between her and the floor is me.

I bury my face in the curve of her neck, my own hands shaking. The sheer terror of what just happened is finally catching up with me.

“I’m sorry,” I grit out and tighten my grip, pressing my jaw hard against her skin to track the

frantic, human thud of her pulse, “I know you’re breaking, Ember Goddess know ther But I couldn’t let that magic swallow you. You stay with me. You stay nge

Logan is pressed against the far wall with Gale’s body shielded under him, staring a an expression that has gone beyond grief into something closer to awe

Whatever he just witnessed, he has no framework for it, and the incomprehension.oaks face is total.

I am focused entirely on the sobbing woman in my arms, bracing myself to do the impossible task of pulling her away from her father’s corpse.

Then, under us, the dead man’s ribs hitch.

It’s a violent, impossible stutter of bone and muscle.

Maurice COUGHS.

A violent, wet, hacking explosion of air that sprays blood across Ember’s hands and makes his whole body convulse on the concrete.

His back arches off the floor, and the sound he makes is the ugliest, most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard — the sound of lungs remembering what they’re for and objecting violently to the process of being dragged back into service.

Ember SCREAMS. It rips out of her as total, unfiltered shock. Her hands fly to her mouth, the blood on them smearing across her face.

She is staring at Maurice’s chest, jerking up and down in intervals, her mind entirely fracturing.

I am staring at the exact same thing, and my brain just stops working.

Wait. No. He was dead.

I felt him die. I literally felt his chest go still. But he is moving. He is spitting blood, and his back is arching off the floor, and I am just frozen.

Dead bodies don’t breathe. That’s it. That’s the rule.

But I can hear the impossible thud of a heartbeat.

Holy shit.

Holy fucking shit.

“What- oh Goddess KNOX. Knox, he’s – is he – am I losing my mind?”

–

I grab her face with my good hand. My grip drops all pretence of command; it’s just raw and

desperate.

My fingers visibly shake against her jaw.

“No,” I breathe out, the word rough and fractured. “No, I see it too. He’s breathing!

I force her trembling hand back down flat onto Maurice’s chest. The heartbeat under her palm is weak and erratic, but it is THERE.

The sob that tears out of her is pure, breathless disbelief.

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