TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 323

CHAPTER 254HET’S KILL IT

CHAPTER 252: LET’S KILL IT

KNOX’S POV

I kiss her standing on the shoulder of a dark highway in Alaska with her legs around my waist and the stars above us and the cold biting every inch of exposed skin and neither of us caring because the heat between us has always been enough.

And it is enough now, and it will be enough tomorrow and next week and next year and for every year after that until I run out of years.

When we break apart, she’s breathless, and her cheeks are flushed, and her eyes are bright and alive in a way that has nothing to do with silver or Sapphire and everything to do with being a woman who just said yes to a man she loves on a road in the middle of nowhere.

“Take me to the flash drive,” she says. “I want to burn it as your fiancée. It’ll feel better.”

“Everything feels better as my fiancée.”

“Don’t push it.”

I carry her back to the car because the ground is still frozen and she’s still in hospital socks.

I set her in the passenger seat and her feet go immediately back on the dashboard and this time I don’t say a word about it.

Logan’s location is exactly what I expected – anonymous, concrete, one of two hundred identical units in

a facility that exists for people who need to hide things.

The code Logan gave us works on the first try, and the door rolls up to reveal a desk, a chair, a laptop, and

a small black external hard drive connected to a portable server no bigger than a shoebox.

The flash drive.

The thing that has been hanging over my life for weeks. It sits on a folding desk in a rented storage unit, and it is astonishingly, insultingly small.

“That’s it?” Ember says. “That’s what all of this was about?”

“That’s it.”

We both stare at it. The drive, the server, the laptop.

The banality of it is almost offensive – sixty-three lives and ten years of lies and a political crisis that nearly brought down a king, and it all fits on a folding desk in a rented concrete box.

“Do you want to watch it?” I ask, and the question costs me more than I expect because part of me needs her to say no.

I don’t want her to see what I was that night. I don’t want her to hear what a feral Lycan sounds like when the human part has left, and the wolf is operating on nothing but chemical rage.

CHAPTER 2624ET’S KILLIT

+25 Points

have spent ten years making sure nobody sees that version of me, and the idea of Ember watching it on a laptop screen in a storage unit makes my stomach turn in a way that has nothing to do with the cold.

“No,” she says. “I don’t need to see it.”

“Good.”

“But I need to verify it’s real.” She looks at me with a practical, no-bullshit expression. “If we destroy a drive full of nothing and the real footage is sitting on another device somewhere, we’ve burned our one chance to confirm what we have. Five seconds, Knox. I play five seconds, I confirm it’s the footage, and we shut it off.”

She’s right. I hate that she’s right.

She opens the laptop. The screen glows to life in the dim storage unit, and the desktop is bare except for a single folder.

She clicks it. There is a video file.

She hovers the cursor over it and looks at me one more time, giving me a chance to stop her, but I don’t, because she’s right and we both know it.

She presses play.

The first second is dark. The second is movement – a ballroom, shot from a high angle, a mounted

camera. Celeste’s camera.

She loved to record Christmas events for posterity. The image is crowded with people in formal dress, drinks in hand, laughter, and the warm golden light of a room decorated for a celebration.

The third second, the screaming starts.

It comes from off-camera first, a sound that doesn’t belong in a ballroom, and then the image lurches as people begin to react, heads turning, glasses dropping, and in the far corner of the frame, a shape moves through the crowd that is not human and not fully wolf and not anything that has a name in any language I

know.

It’s fast and wrong, and the sounds it makes are worse than the screams because the sounds are coming from ME, from whatever I was that night.

They are guttural and wet, and I can hear the difference between the sound of claws hitting fabric and the sound of claws hitting flesh and-

Ember slams the laptop shut.

The silence in the storage unit is absolute. My ears are ringing. Five seconds.

She played five seconds, and the sound is already living in my head alongside every other sound from that night that Nathaniel’s truth tore

open this morning.

CHAPTER

Ember is standing very still, her hand flat on the closed laptop, her jaw tight, her breathing carefully controlled, the way people breathe when they are manaying a reaction they don’t want to show.

“It’s the one,” she says quietly.

I move toward her, and the words come out before I can shape them into anything that doesn’t sound like begging.

“Ember, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you had to hear that. That thing on the screen, that’s not – I wasn’t -”

She turns and catches my face in both hands, and the grip is firm enough to stop my sentence and my spiral and the downward trajectory of every thought in my head.

“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t you dare apologise for something that was done TO you. That video is the product of a man who drugged your coffee and a gene you didn’t choose, and a night you weren’t conscious for.

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