TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 324

CHAPTER 264MSRITING IT ALL ON FIRE

CHAPTER 253: SETTING IT ALL ON FIRE

KNOX’S POV

The dead man’s trigger first. I enter Logan’s code into the server interface – the alphanumeric sequence, exactly as he recited it in the storage room with that smile I still can’t decode.

The system prompts for confirmation. I confirm. The screen flashes once, a progress bar runs, and then a single line of text:

DISTRIBUTION PROTOCOL DEACTIVATED. TRIGGER OFFLINE.

The kill switch is dead.

Ember exhales beside me. I didn’t realise she’d been holding her breath.

I pull out the diagnostic device Nathaniel gave me.

Military-grade, designed for intelligence operations – it scans for duplication signatures, verifies whether data has been copied or transferred to external devices, and confirms whether the physical drive is the

original or a clone.

I plug it in, and the scan takes four minutes while Ember stands beside me with her arms crossed, tracking the progress bar with sharp, untrusting focus.

She has been burned by half-measures before, and she refuses to look away until it finishes.

The results come back clean. Original drive. No duplicate signatures. No evidence of transfer beyond the server we already neutralised.

“It’s the only copy,” I say.

“Good. Let’s kill it.”

We drag a metal bin from the refuse area and pile everything inside – the drive, the server, the laptop.

I siphon fuel from the SUV and pour it over the hardware, and the whole arrangement looks improvised, unglamorous, and absolutely perfect.

“Before we light it,” Ember says. “I want to say something to it.”

She stands across the bin from me, wearing my jacket and hospital socks. Her expression is set in pure, unyielding resolve.

She has decided this moment matters, and she will force it to mean something whether the universe cooperates or not.

“I spent eight years married to a man who made me small,” she says, and her voice is steady. “Eight years of being told I was nothing, being treated like property, being reduced to a treaty clause with legs. And the worst part wasn’t the hitting or the cruelty or the loneliness. The worst part was that I started to believe it. I started to think that smallness was all I was built for.”

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CHAPTER 257-

TING IT ALL ON FIRE

She looks at the bin.

“This drive holds the worst night of your life. My worst years don’t fit on a hard drive. They’re in my head and my body and the finch I still have when someone raises their voice and the way I still check the exits in every room I walk into.” She looks at me, and her eyes are dry and fierce, and I am so in love with this woman that it physically hurts. “I’m burning that tonight. Not just the drive. My ghosts, too. Eight years of being Gale Crawford’s punching bag goes into that bin, and when the fire is done, I’m walking away from it, and I am never, ever going back.”

“Your turn,” she says.

I look at the bin and the small, ordinary machine that holds sixty-three deaths and two children under a bed and a wife I didn’t know I was killing and a decade of guilt so heavy it has warped the shape of my spine.

“I have carried the Greenvale massacre for ten years,” I say. “I’ve let it define me. I’ve let it shrink me into a man who deserves punishment and nothing else, and I’ve pushed away every person who tried to love me because I believed I was too dangerous to be loved.” I look at Ember, and the security light catches the amber in her eyes, and the sight of her face in this moment is the most important thing I have ever seen.

I’m done letting it be the loudest thing in the room. I’m done letting sixty-three ghosts take up more space

than the living woman who just agreed to marry me in an SUV.”

She laughs, startled, and the sound of it in this parking lot under these stars is worth every terrible thing

that happened today.

“The guilt stays,” I say. “It’s mine, and I’ll carry it as long as I breathe. But it rides in the back seat from now

1. It doesn’t drive.”

Ember reaches across the bin and takes my broken hand. She threads her fingers gently through mine,

applying a soft, intentional pressure.

I light the fuel with my other hand.

The flames catch fast and climb through the hardware, licking around the laptop’s edges, finding the drive,

consuming the server.

The plastic casing warps and bubbles.

[

Internal components glow orange, slowly deforming in the flames. The laptop screen cracks from the intense heat, the glass falling inward.

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