TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 340

CHAPTER 268: THE THREE OF US

EMBER’S POV

When her eyes meet mine, the dying socialite and the sharp–tongued ex are nowhere to be found. The pretense is over.

Underneath it all is just a terrified girl who has worn armor for so long she forgot it wasn’t skin.

“So why are you doing this? Why are you selling me hope right now like it’s something I can afford? Wh are you trying to make this HARDER? Do you know how hard I’ve fought to get to this place? To this acceptance? I don’t want to go back to the hoping, Ember. The hoping is what kept me awake at three the morning bargaining with a Goddess who stopped listening months ago.” Her voice drops to a whis that is barely audible above the heart monitor. “I’m scared. I am so scared, and I have been holding this together with herbs and sarcasm and sheer fucking vanity, and under all of it I am TERRIFIED of what comes next. Of the dark. Of whatever judgement the Goddess has waiting for a woman who left good men at altars and manipulated everyone she ever loved and spent her entire life being a fucking monst am terrified that when the fire comes for me, it won’t be gentle, because I haven’t earned gentle. I’ve earned exactly what’s coming.”

She is sobbing, coughing, bleeding. Her fingers crush mine like a lifeline. Beside her, Queenie weeps in total silence.

I am crying too, tears tracking down my face and dropping from my jaw. The pain in this room is so vast so incredibly concentrated, that the air itself feels too heavy to breathe.

“So please,” Rayana whispers. “Please don’t make me hope again. It hurts too much. I can’t survive it one more time.”

I take her face in my hands. Gently, the way Knox takes mine when I’m spiralling and he needs me to hea him with something deeper than ears.

I hold her and I make her look at me and I don’t wipe my own tears because wiping them would mean letting go and I am not letting go.

“You can hate me for this,” I say, and my voice is thick and wrecked but I force it steady because one of us has to be steady and right now it’s me. “You can hate me tomorrow and the day after and every day you have left. But right now, even if this is what it takes, even if I have to drag Sapphire out of myself by force and MAKE her listen, even if I have to tear apart every secret my mother ever buned and track down every answer this bloodline has been hiding 1, Ember Aragon, am going to find a way And you don’t get to tal me out of it. Not with fear, not with logic, not with the most heartbreaking speech I’ve ever heard in my life

”

I wipe the blood from the corner of her mouth with my thumb Gently The way you’d touch something

precious

“Because you’re sitting in this hospital bed eating terrible ice cream and making me laugh on the worst

CHARTE

REE OF LIS

weck of my life. Because two weeks ago I didn’t know how to like you and right now I can’t imagine t story without you in it, and I refuse to find out what that loss feels like when there’s even the smallest

chance I can prevent it.”

Rayana’s eyes close. Her hands come up and cover mine or her face and she holds them there, press my palms against her cheeks, and the trembling in her fingers gradually, slowly, begins to still.

“If this doesn’t work,” she whispers, “it’s going to break me worse than dying would.”

“Then it better work.”

Then she smiles and looks at me.

“Well,” she says finally “If you’re going to save my life, the least I can do is help you pick a wedding dre

have impeccable taste and I insist.”

“Deal.”

“And the ring. I meant what I said about the ring. Knox will buy something hideous if left unsupervised.‘

“Also deal.”

“And I want to be a bridesmaid. Well, if I make it out alive, that is. But the sympathy factor alone will ma

the photos incredible.”

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