TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 320

CHAPTER 250: LEAST ROMANTIC ORIGIN STORY–1

KNOX’S POV

“He won’t talk, Ember.”

“What if we should have-

+25 Paints &

“No.” The word comes out harder than I intend. “No, we should not have. Logan is a man who just lost the person he loved, and I am not murdering him for being in the wrong room at the wrong time.”

“What if James already knows? What if his guards felt the house shaking and they’ve already reported it and there’s a file somewhere with my name on it and-”

“The guards were outside. They felt vibrations and saw structural damage. The official report says incendiary bolts. There is no file with your name on it because there is no evidence that anything beyond a conventional weapon was used in that house.” I reach across and take her hand because her fingers are starting to shake the way they do when the spiral is building momentum. “Ember. Look at me.”

She looks.

“I have spent years hiding what I am from people who would destroy me if they knew. I am very, very good

at it. And I am going to be just as good at hiding what YOU are until we understand it well enough to stop

hiding. Nobody is going to study you. Nobody is going to test you. And nobody is going to take you from

me for any reason, ever, because I will burn down every institution on this continent before I let that

happen, and that is not a metaphor.”

Her hand tightens in mine, and the shaking slows, and she exhales a breath she’s been holding since she

started talking.

“What if I can’t control it?” she asks, and this is the real fear – the one under all the others, the foundation

that everything else is built on. “What if Sapphire just keeps getting stronger and I never learn how to direct it and one day she erupts when I’m standing next to you or next to our-” She stops, swallows, and reroutes. “Next to someone I love, and instead of saving them, I hurt them?”

r

“Then we figure it out. We find someone who understands what Sapphire is. Your mother has answers. The woman with the crest and the twins has answers. They’re out there, and we’ll find them.”

“And if we can’t?”

“Then I will stand next to you while you learn by trial and error, and if you melt my shoes, I’ll buy new ones. Easy.”

She almost laughs. It gets stuck halfway but I can see it fighting to come out and the fact that she’s even close to laughing right now fills me with something I can’t name.

“I’m scared of something else,” she says quietly, and her feet come down from the dashboard, which tells me this one is serious because the dashboard has been her hill to die on for the last twenty minutes.

CHAPTER LEAST ROMANTIC ORIGIN STORY–1

“Tell me

“What if you don’t love me when this is over?”

I am so blindsided by this that I nearly miss the turn and have to correct the wheel.

+25 Points:

The SUV swerves slightly, and Ember grabs the handle above the door and looks at me with an expression that is half terrified and half amused by my driving.

“WHAT?”

“When we get to your estate. When we’re not running from something or fighting someone or holding each other together through the next catastrophe.” Her voice is careful, deliberate, each word placed like a foot on uncertain ground. “We’ve only ever existed in crisis, Knox. Every moment between us has been stolen between disasters. What if without the danger and the adrenaline and the constant threat of death, we’re just… two strangers who got very intense very fast and don’t actually know how to be boring with each other?”

“You think I’m going to get bored of you?”

“C’mon, you’re King, Knox. You’re this powerful Lycan Alpha guy who is undeniably attractive and unattainable. The ladies dig that. I think you could have ANY woman. I think the world is full of people who

are shinier and easier and less damaged and don’t come with a wolf that melts furniture and a dead

ex–husband and a mother who’s missing and a father in a coma. I think one day you’ll wake up next to me

and realise that the woman you chose in the middle of a war isn’t the woman you want in the middle of a

peace, because in peacetime there are options, Knox. Beautiful, uncomplicated, baggage–free options who

don’t flinch when someone raises their voice.”

Comments

LUCK DRAW

Vote

595

r

CHAPTER 2HEN I BOMM ORIGIN STORY O

CHAPTER 250: LEAST ROMANTIC ORIGIN STORY–2

“Ember, I fell in love with you in an airplane bathroom while you were crying in the toilet.”

“That doesn’t-”

“The toilet, Ember. You had mascara runging down your face and you told me to go away and I didn’t, because even then, even before I knew your wolf or anything about you beyond the fact that you were crying in the wrong bathroom, I looked at you and something in my chest rearranged itself and never went back.” I take her hand. “You were furious and heartbroken, and you had tears on your chin with snot down your nose, and you looked at me like I was the most irritating thing that had ever walked through a door, which I probably was, and my brain said ‘oh no, it’s her‘ because I knew. Right then. In a bathroom the size of a coffin that smelled like recycled air and industrial cleaner.”

“That is the least romantic origin story I’ve ever heard.”

“And yet it’s ours, and I wouldn’t trade it for a candlelit dinner or a moonlit balcony or whatever other

setting would have made a better story, because the setting doesn’t matter. The tears mattered. The fury

mattered. The woman mattered.” I bring her hand to my mouth and press my lips to her knuckles, one at a time, slow. “And here’s the pathetic truth, Ember – it didn’t even start in that bathroom. You’d been living rent–free in my head since the first time I saw you at a pack function, and I didn’t even know your name yet. I was catching glimpses of your eyes across rooms and tracking the way you smiled at people who didn’t deserve your warmth and don’t get me started on your hips because I am a grown man and a king and I was watching you walk away from a drinks table like a goddamn schoolboy with a crush, and it was the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever experienced and I didn’t care.” I hold her gaze. “I was down bad before I ever spoke a word to you. I was a king running a continent and I couldn’t get a stranger’s smile out of my head. That’s not a man who’s going to get bored of you, baby. That’s a man who was finished before he started. And as for the shinier, easier, uncomplicated women you’re so worried about – I have met every beautiful woman on this continent. They come to galas and council dinners and pack functions and they wear things designed to get my attention and some of them are stunning and every single one of them leaves my memory the second they leave the room. You walked into a bathroom with mascara on your face and you turned a crush into something that rewired my entire life. There is no one, absolutely nothing, that could get me any less fixated on everything you are, Ember Aragon. Not a damn thing.”

M

595

Comments

LUCK DRAW >