TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 313

CHAPTER 243: WHY THE SMILE?

KNOX’S POV

The guards look at me. I’m standing in the storage room doorway, my mouth open, because the man I just offered freedom to is requesting à eage.

“Logan. I just offered you safe passage. You can LEAVE.”

“I don’t want your safe passage,” he says, staring straight ahead at the doorway. “I don’t want your mercy or your guilt or your freedom. Burn my company to the ground and strip my accounts. I want nothing. I just want a cell. I want four walls and a floor, because nothing is exactly what I have left. I would rather sit

inside that truth than play pretend under a new identity.”

The guards are still looking at me, waiting for confirmation.

I nod. Because what else can I do? You can’t force a man to accept freedom when prison is the only

structure his grief will fit inside.

They cuff him. He gives up his wrists with patient, empty cooperation. The arrest means absolutely

nothing to him.

The only sentence that matters was already delivered by a bullet in that storage room.

Nathaniel is beside me as they lead Logan through the kitchen. His voice is low, pitched for my ears only.

“He’s a loose end. He saw what happened in that room. Whatever happened with Ember. He knows things nobody outside this circle should know.” A pause. “He shouldn’t leave this house alive, Knox.”

I watch Logan walk through the destroyed living room in handcuffs, naked, Gale’s blood drying on his chest, and the man I’m looking at is already serving a life sentence that no council prison will ever match.

“No.”

“Knox, listen to me. If he talks – if he tells ANYONE what he saw-”

“He won’t.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Look at him, Nathaniel.” Logan is stepping through the ruined front door into the cold. The council guards are guiding him toward the vehicle, and he’s walking without resistance. “That man just had the person he loved most in the world die in a room I put him in. He is living in a hell that makes whatever the council does to him feel like a holiday. And I am not – I am NOT – adding another body to tonight’s count because you’ve decided he’s inconvenient.”

Nathaniel’s jaw works.

The calculation behind his eyes is running, and I can see him weighing the risk against the cost and arriving at the same conclusion I have, which is that killing Logan Reeves tonight would be the practical

< CHAPTER 24–WHY THE SMILE?

+25 Points >

thing and the efficient thing and the smart thing, and it would also make me the kind of man I’ve been trying not to become.

Logan isn’t my friend. But I’m the reason Gale is dead. And that debt buys him his life, whether Nathaniel

likes it or not.

“Fine,” Nathaniel says. The word comes out like he’s swallowing glass. “But if he becomes a problem-”

“Then he becomes MY problem. Not yours. Not anymore.”

As they lead Logan toward the council vehicle, I follow. I need to ask one more time.

“Logan. Any other copies? Any other contingencies I should know about?”

He stops in the doorway and turns around. The winter light catches his face, bringing back that faint,

ghostly smile.

It lingers there like the residue of whatever private satisfaction he found in giving me the code.

“You have the location. You have the code. There’s nothing else.” His eyes hold mine. “Bury him

somewhere with sunlight. He hated the cold.”

They take him. The vehicle disappears down the road.

I stand in the doorframe, and the smile stays with me.

I turn it over in my head the way you’d turn over a coin, looking for the trick, and I can’t find it. He gave me the code. The code will work. The server will be located, the trigger deactivated.

So why the smile? Why would a man who just lost everything and surrendered himself to prison look at me

like he’d won something?

I file it. There are too many fires burning to chase a feeling.

Gale’s burial I arrange through the captain before he leaves. Though it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, he is given full honours. Private ceremony.

I tell them to find somewhere with sunlight and open ground, not a mausoleum, not a yault.

Somewhere warm.

Logan will be escorted from custody to attend under guard.

The captain registers the order with perfect neutrality.

He clearly harbours personal opinions about giving full honours to Gale, but he swallows those thoughts, understanding that the Lycan King expects absolute compliance rather than commentary.

Nathaniel appears at my shoulder.

“James is on his way,” he says. “His team radioed him twenty minutes ago. He’ll be here within the hour.”

“Good. Let him walk in.” I flex my broken hand, drawing sharp clarity from the ache in my knuckles.

4 CHAPTER

WHY THE SMILE‘

+29 Points

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify