TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 341

CHAPTER 269: I’M LOSING HER

EMBER’S POV

My spine stiffens. I know what this is.

He’s going to plead his case. He’s going to explain why Knox should keep him, why the twenty years service outweigh the sixty–three bodies, why firing him would be politically catastrophic.

He’s going to be logical and measured and strategically compelling because that’s what Nathaniel d he engineers outcomes.

And he’s come to me because he thinks I have influence over Knox’s decision, which I do, and he thi can convince me to use it in his favour, which he cannot.

“If this is about Knox-”

“It’s about Queenie.”

I stop mid–dismissal.

Whatever i was about to say evaporates from my mouth and what replaces it is silence, because of al things I expected Nathaniel to say in this corridor, that was not one of them.

“What?”

“I need to talk to you about Queenie.” His voice is different from any version I’ve heard before.

This voice has been stripped and sanded until there’s nothing left but the grain underneath, and the gra is pain.

“Can we sit somewhere?”

We find a quiet corner of the hospital cafeteria. It’s empty except for a janitor mopping the floor at the end.

Nathaniel sits across from me and his hands are on the table and they’re not doing anything which is alarming because Nathaniel’s hands are always doing something – typing, scrolling, organizing, the constant motion of a man whose brain runs faster than his body and needs the physical output to keep pace.

His hands are still. That’s how I know this is bad.

“Before I say what I came to say, I owe you something,” he says “An acknowledgment About the things | \ said about you.”

“Nathaniel, we don’t need to-

“We do. I told Knox that his pattern of recklessness was your fault. That his willingness to throw everything away had been recurring since you came into his life. I said those words and I meant them when I said them and I was spectacularly, catastrophically wrong” His jaw works “The recklessness wasn’t yours. The

CHAPTER 264M LOSING HER

instability wasn’t yours. The man who was actually destabilising Knox Volkov was the one giving the speech, and I was so convinced of my own righteousness that I couldn’t see the hypocrisy of blamir woman for the exact damage I was causing with my own hands.”

I look at this man – the pressed shirt wrinkled, the dark circles under his eyes – and the anger I exp

to feel isn’t there.

It’s been replaced by something more complicated, something that lives in the space between resen

and recognition.

“Thank you for saying that.”

“It’s not enough. I know it’s not enough. But it’s the truth and l`owed it to you before I ask for what I’m

about to ask for.”

“Which is?”

His hands move. Finally. He runs them through his hair – a gesture I’ve seen him make exactly twice, times when something has exceeded his capacity. And when they come back to the table, they’re sha

“I’m losing her, Ember.”

The rawness of it catches me off guard. Not the content I know he’s losing Queenie, everyone who spent five minutes in a room with them knows he’s losing Queenie.

But its the delivery.

Nathaniel doesn’t DO raw. Nathaniel does controlled, curated, strategically optimised versions of emot

that serve specific purposes.

This isn’t that. This is a man whose engine has run out of fuel and is coasting on fumes and fear

“She won’t look at me. She won’t touch me. She stood in a hospital corridor yesterday and told me thing that I – that I deserved to hear, and I know I deserved to hear them, and knowing that doesn’t make the hearing any less-” He stops and regroups. The old Nathaniel struggling to reassert control over the new Nathaniel who is falling apart in a hospital cafeteria. “I have solved every problem Knox has ever faced. 1 have navigated crises after crises, managed cover–ups, engineered outcomes that should have been impossible. And I cannot figure out how to make my wife look at me the way she used to.”

“Nathaniel-”

“If you can help me. If there’s anything – any insight, any advice, anything you know about what she needs that I’m not seeing – I will give up anything” His voice cracks “My position, my access, my place beside Knox. All of it. I will trade every piece of power I’ve held for twenty years for one more chance with the woman I masied.”

He slides off the chair.

He goes to his knees on the cafeteria floor.

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