TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 325

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CHAPTER 254: HONORING THEM

EMBER’S POV

The fire is still burning when Knox says it.

He’s staring into the flames with an expression I haven’t seen before, and the orange light is catching the planes of his handsome face, making the shadows under his eyes look like bruises and the bruises look like shadows.

Five seconds.

That’s how long I played the footage before I slammed the laptop shut, and those five seconds are still living inside my skull like an unwanted tenant.

The ballroom. The golden lighting. The laughter of people who had minutes left to live and didn’t know it.

And then the sound – the sound that came from the far corner of the frame, the thing that was Knox and wasn’t Knox, the guttural growl that belongs in a nightmare.

I closed it before I saw what he became. But I heard the beginning of what he did, and the beginning was enough.

The man beside me, holding my hand, watching a fire consume the evidence of his worst night, this man is not that sound. This man is not that night.

I need to believe that the way I need to breathe, and I do believe it, and the believing is not hard because the man who made that sound was chemically hijacked, and the man holding my hand chose to be here.

I look at him. “Whose families?”

“The sixty–three. Every person who died that night had people who loved them and buried them and never got an explanation. Parents who lost children. Children who lost parents. Partners who went to bed next to someone on Christmas Eve and woke up alone on Christmas morning.” The fire pops, and a piece of the laptop casing collapses inward, and the sparks rise into the dark. “I’ve spent ten years hiding from that night. Letting Nathaniel bury it, letting the cover–up hold, letting those families grieve without answers because the truth was too dangerous for my reign. And the drive is ash now, and the cover–up is holding, and none of that changes the fact that sixty–three people are dead and their families deserved better.”

The weight of what he’s saying settles over me.

“What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know yet. Anonymously, maybe. Funds, resources, whatever they need. Finding every last family connected to that night and trying to make something right without blowing the whole thing open.” He watches the fire. “I can’t bring them back. I can’t confess without starting the war we just spent days preventing. But I can stop pretending they don’t exist. I can stop treating them like collateral damage that I’m allowed to forget because remembering is inconvenient.”

< CHAPTER 254HONORING THEM

Lequeeze his hand.

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“If there is any way I can help with that, you MUST get me involved, Knox. Don’t carry this one alone. Don’t make decisions behind closed doors about how to make amends and then present me with the results. I want to be in the room when yoù figure this out.”

He smiles. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

I glare at him because I know that tone. That’s the tone of a man who is going to do exactly what he wants and inform me afterwards.

“I mean it.”

He lifts our joined hands and presses his lips to my knuckles and then to his own, holding them together against his mouth.

And the tenderness of it

our hands pressed together, his mouth warm against our intertwined fingers – splits something open in my chest that I’ve been protecting all night.

“I mean it too. You’re part of my story now, Ember. We do this one the same way we do everything else.”

When the flames die down, and the bin holds nothing but blackened metal and ash, I look at him.

Something lights up inside me that has been dark for hours. Impulsive. Slightly manic. It is the reckless, breathless energy of finally reaching the other side of hell.

I want to feel ALIVE in a way that has nothing to do with survival, and everything to do with joy.

“I want to do something,” I say.

Knox’s eyes narrow with immediate suspicion. He has learned through repeated experience that my impulses are rarely sensible.

“What kind of something?”

“The kind you’re going to say no to and then do anyway because you can’t say no to me.”

“That’s disturbingly accurate. What is it?”

“I want to go swimming.”

He stares at me. “It’s one in the morning. In Alaska. In winter.”

୮

“There’s a hot spring forty minutes from here. I saw the sign on the way. Open–air thermal pool. Under the

stars.”

“Ember, we are in the middle of-”

“We just burned the thing that almost destroyed us. My father is alive and stable. The man I love accidentally proposed to me on a highway, and I said yes in hospital socks. I have been shot at, held down, covered in blood, and possessed by my own wolf in the last twelve hours, and I am ASKING you, Knox Volkov, future husband, king of a hallway full of abandoned shoes, to take me to a hot spring at one

CHAPTER 264 HONORING THEM

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in the morning so I can sit in warm water under the stars with you and feel something other than terror for

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