TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 336

CHAPTER 264-16 HE DEAD?

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CHAPTER 264: IS HE DEAD?

EMBER’S POV

We eat terrible ice cream in Rayana’s hospital bed. Three wornen, three plastic cups, and the steady bee

of a heart monitor keeping time like a metronome.

And the conversation that follows is the most honest I’ve had with anyone other than Knox.

Rayana starts it. She puts her ice cream down and looks at me, and the performative energy drains from

her face like water from a tub.

What’s left is just a woman in a hospital bed who needs to say something that has been sitting on her

chest for weeks.

“I owe you an apology,” she says. “About Rafael.”

I go still. Queenie goes still.

“I brought him into your life. I co-signed that trip. I sat in his living room and drank his champagne and

listened to him talk about fate and mate bonds, and I thought he was charming and romantic and I

INTRODUCED you to his personal orbit.” She swallows. “He told me things, Ember. About his beliefs about

you. About his obsession with the idea that you were his fated mate. And I thought it was sweet. I thought

it was a love story. I didn’t understand what it actually was until Knox decoded the Bacchanal in Zürich,

and by then you were already at that lodge with that man and his compound and his sick, fucking

medieval ritual.”.

“Rayana, you didn’t know-”

“I SHOULD have known. I knew he was intense. I knew he was fixated. I saw the way he looked at you, and I told myself it was admiration when it was actually something much darker and much more dangerous. And because I was so wrapped up in my own dying and my own bucket list and my own pathetic need to manufacture a last adventure, I handed you to him on a silver platter.” Her jaw tightens. “I’m sorry. Not the performative kind. The real kind. The kind that keeps me awake at three in the morning, which is

inconvenient because three in the morning is already when the coughing is worst.”

I reach for her hand. The thin, brittle fingers close around mine, and I can feel the tremor in them that

wasn’t there a month ago.

“I forgive you,” I say. “I forgave you before you asked, Rayana. You didn’t drug me. You didn’t build the compound. You didn’t force me into heat. Rafael did those things, and Rafael is-”

“Dead?” Rayana says, and something in the way she says it – the slight lift at the end, the pause before the word – makes me look at her more carefully.

“Knox killed him. With his own hands.”

Rayana frowns.

CHAPTER 264 IS HE DEAD?

“Are you sure about that?”

“What do you mean, am I sure?”

⚫25 Points

“I mean…” She hesitates, which is unusual for a woman who has never hesitated about anything in her life. “I could be wrong. I’ve been on enough painkillers to hallucinate a small orchestra. But a few nights ago, I

heard the nurses talking outside my door. Whispering, actually, which is how I knew it was worth listening

to, because nurses only whisper when the information is above their pay grade.”

“What kind of whispers?”

“Something about an emergency signal that came in from the top. Someone very high up, demanding the

most skilled surgeons available. That night alone, all ten of the hospital’s senior doctors were pulled from their shifts and driven out in private cars. Ten doctors, Ember. In the middle of the night. In private

vehicles.”

“That could be anyone,” Queenie says, and her voice has the firm, practical tone of a woman who is

actively trying to prevent the conversation from going where it’s going. “A council member, an elder’s

family, some alpha with deep pockets and a burst appendix. It doesn’t prove anything, and Knox killed

Rafael.”

“Did he, though?” Rayana says quietly. “Did anyone check?”

The question sits in the room, and neither of us answers it immediately because the truth is ugly and

simple: we don’t know.

“I wasn’t-” I start, and the memory surfaces with a nausea that has nothing to do with the tropical

paradise ice cream.

The Bachanal. The chemicals tearing through my blood. Knox’s wolf, massive and terrible, stepping over a

body on the floor. A body that was still. A body that was broken.

“I wasn’t in any state to check anything. The compound was still in my system, and I could barely stand.”

“He wasn’t moving,” Queenie supplies. “I remember that much. He was on the ground and he wasn’t

moving.”

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