TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 319

+25 Points

CHAPTER 249: A MILLION WHAT IFS

KNOX’S POV

Ember sleeps for an hour in the hospital chair beside Maurice’s bed with her hand wrapped around his on the blanket and her face finally, mercifully slack in a way that tells me her body has overruled her brain and forced a shutdown.

I watch her for a while. The rise and fall of her breathing, the way her fingers stay curled around Maurice’s even in sleep, the smudge of dried blood she missed on her jaw.

She sleeps the way she does everything – completely, without half–measures, surrendered to it in a way that makes me want to build a wall around this room and post guards and let her stay here until her body decides it’s had enough rest, which, based on the last seventy–two hours, would be approximately next

week.

But the flash drive is still waiting, and every hour it exists is an hour I spend carrying a weight I’m ready to put down.

I almost leave alone.

I consider letting her sleep in that chair with Maurice’s hand in hers, knowing Queenie is curled up safely

down the hall.

The hospital is quiet, secure, and fully staffed with people who can call me if anything changes. She needs

rest far more than she needs to watch a hard drive burn.

My selfish desire to keep her beside me wars completely against the knowledge that she has endured

enough for one day.

I touch her shoulder. Gently, the way you’d touch something you’re afraid of waking too abruptly.

She startles anyway.

The full–body jolt, the hand flying up and catching my wrist before her eyes are open, the half–second of panic that lives in the nervous system of a woman who has had too many bad days in a row.

“It’s me,” I say. “Just me.”

She blinks and focuses. The grip on my wrist loosens, slides down to my fingers, and holds on.

“What time is it?”

“Just past midnight. Maurice is stable. Queenie’s sleeping down the hall. And there’s a flash drive that I want to turn into a pile of ash, but I was thinking about going alone because you sleep like something out of a painting and waking you felt criminal.”

“You were going to go WITHOUT me?”

“I was considering it. You looked peaceful and I have a functional hand and a car and the address.”

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NWHAT ITS

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“Knox Vulkuv. I swear to every version of the goddess, if you had left this hospital without me to go destroy the thing that almost ruined our lives, I would never have forgiven you and you know it.” “Which is why I woke you up instead of following my better judgment.”

She gives me a look that is equal parts fury and fondness, and I am struck, as I am roughly forty times a day, by the fact that this woman’s face is the most expressive thing I have ever encountered.

And every expression it makes is aimed at me,

She leans over Maurice’s bed and presses her lips to his forehead and whispers something I don’t hear.

Then she stands, winces because hours in a hospital chair has done unspeakable things to her back, and threads her arm through mine.

“Let’s go kill it.”

The car is a black SUV from my security detail. I drive because Nathaniel is somewhere in this hospital, processing whatever is left of his marriage, and I don’t want him for this.

This is ours.

The first ten minutes are quiet. The roads are empty, and the Alaskan night is doing that thing it does

where the darkness feels infinite.

The headlights carve a tunnel through it, and the rest of the world simply ceases to exist beyond the

edges of the light.

Ember kicks her feet up onto the dashboard. My initial instinct is to bristle at the shoes.

“Feet down.”

“My feet are cold.”

“The floor is closer to the heater than the dashboard.”

“The dashboard is closer to the windshield, and the windshield has a defroster, and the defroster is warm.”

“That’s not how cars work.”

“It’s exactly how THIS car works because I’m sitting in it and my feet are on the dashboard and they’re getting warmer, so empirically, I’m right.”

I look at her. She stares right back, her expression radiating the serene confidence of absolute victory.

She simply refuses to lose, and we both know it.

I immediately swallow the reprimand. Seeing her completely at ease inside my territory matters far more than keeping the car pristine.

The feet stay on the dashboard.

“How did Harrison find us?” she asks after a while, her voice shifting from playful to serious with the

CHAPTER 249CA MILLION

WHAT AS

125 Paints

abruptness that I’ve learned means the question has been sitting in her mouth for hours, and she’s been chewing on it.

“We don’t know for certain, but the most likely answer is James. After the Bacchanal, the chaos at Rafael’s lodge drew massive attention. Council resources must have silently swarmed the area, and James had eyes on everything. When we left the compound, his people would have tracked the movement and fed the information to Harrison. James wanted Gale found a living witness to illegal detention by the crown.

J

That was his ammunition. Harrison just did something uglier with it than James planned, but I doubt James is losing sleep over the outcome. Gale dead still points back at me, and James gets to play concerned elder arriving to restore order while his ally does the dirty work.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“That’s James. Manipulative. Vindictive. Disgusting.”

She’s quiet for a moment, staring out the window at the dark.

“What if Logan talks?” she says, and her voice has changed again

again

smaller now, tighter. “He knows what’s on the flash. He saw what happened in that room. The heat, the light, my eyes. He saw Sapphire. What if that’s why he made it so easy?”

“He won’t talk.”

“But what if he does? Knox, he has damning things on both of us! He is going to be under James‘ custody.

Goddess knows what he would do. Or say. Or plot. What if he tells the council that I can melt pipes and

crack concrete and restart hearts? They’ll want to study me. They’ll want to test me. They’ll want to know

what I am and how I work and whether I can be used, and Knox, I can’t-”

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