TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 318

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CHAPTER 248: DO I EXILE HIM?

EMBER’S POV

I sit beside his bed. Knox sits beside me. His hand finds mine, and his thumb traces circles on my knuckles. The motion is slow, rhythmic, and grounding in a way that I need more than I’m willing to admit. In that room, I tell Knox everything. The arrows, the plan, Queenie going for the gun, the man who grabbed her, firing the shot, Harrison’s men breaching the house. Harrison walking past me like I was nothing. Maurice in the doorway. The speech. The knife. The gunshot. Gale dying chained to a pipe. Harrison’s last words. The trigger pull.

I tell it flatly, in order, like I’m reading it off a list, because the emotions are too big to attach to the words right now, and the mechanical delivery is the only way I can get through the sequence without breaking again.

Knox listens without interrupting. When I finish, the silence is the kind that absorbs rather than demands.

“The flash drive is neutralised,” he says, and I can hear in his voice that he’s giving me something good to hold onto after everything bad I just gave him. “Logan gave up the location and the passcode. I’ll go tonight and destroy the drive myself. I don’t want to watch what’s on it. I don’t need more of that night in my head. I’ll break it and burn it, and that chapter is closed.”

“Logan just gave it up?“.

“It seemed… strange. But he gave it.” A pause. “He blames me for Gale. He’s right to. I put Gale in that

room. I created the circumstances that led Harrison there. The chain of decisions that ended with those

bullets started with mine.”

“Knox-”

“I’m not fishing for absolution. I’m stating a fact. And Logan stated it too, in considerably less polite terms.

His jaw tightens. “He surrendered to the council guards. I offered him safe passage. Freedom, new

identity, disappear. He turned it down. Walked to the guards, held out his wrists, and confessed to everything.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because he doesn’t want freedom. He wants a cell. He wants to sit in his grief in a room that matches the size of what’s left of his life.” Knox’s voice is quiet. “I understand that more than I’d like to.”

I lean my head against his shoulder. The machines beep. Maurice breathes.

“There’s something else,” Knox says, and the way he says it careful, like he’s handling something fragile

– tells me this is going to cost him.

“Tell me.”

CHAPTERZAR HOTELE MOME

425 Points

“Nathaniel.” He exhales. “You know what he did. The drugging, the Celeste thing, the cover–up. But knowing it and deciding what to do about if are two different things. I’ve been carrying this since this morning, and I don’t have an answer.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that the man who just managed my crime scene and removed the chains and built the cover story and coordinated the medical response and handled Elder James’s surveillance team is the same man who drugged my coffee and engineered the death of sixty–three people. And I told him he’s done. When this is over, he’s done. But I don’t know what ‘done‘ looks like.” His hand tightens on mine. “Do I turn him over to the council? They’d execute him. Do I exile him? He knows every secret I have – he IS every secret I have. Do I keep him and spend the rest of my life working beside a man I can’t trust and can’t forgive?”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to go back twenty years and choose a different boy to stand by my side. But that boy doesn’t exist. The boy I chose turned into this man, and this man saved my life a hundred times and destroyed it once, and I don’t know how to weigh those against each other.” He presses his lips to the top of my head. “He’s my friend, Ember. Despite everything. He’s the closest thing I’ve had to a brother for twenty years, and he is a monster and a traitor and the man who would step in front of a bullet for me without hesitation, and I hate him, and I love him, and I don’t know what to do with either of those things.”

I don’t have an answer for him. I don’t think there IS an answer, not one that resolves cleanly, not one that makes the contradiction disappear.

Nathaniel is everything Knox says he is – all of it, simultaneously, without the courtesy of separating into

manageable pieces.

“You don’t have to decide tonight,” I say. “Tonight, you came for me. You held me in a room where the

ceiling was caving in, and you brought me back. That’s enough for tonight.”

“That seems to be my theme for the evening. Enough for tonight.”

“It’s a good theme. Better than most.”

He almost smiles. Almost.

୮

“Rayana is here,” he says. “I had her transferred here after Zurich. She’s been admitted for a while. But a

different wing.”

I lift my head. “Is she okay?”

The pause before he answers tells me the answer is no, but the specific quality of the pause breath, the slight tension in his jaw – tells me there’s more to it than he’s saying right now.

“She’s… managing. She mentioned wanting to see you. Tomorrow, maybe. When you’ve slept.”

“Knox. Is she okay?”

the held

“That’s her story to tell. Not mine.” He kisses my temple. “Tomorrow. Tonight, you sleep. And I go kill a

C CHAPTER JAROTENIETIM

flash drive.”

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