TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 346

CHAPTER 273: THE SOVEREIGN

CHAPTER 273: THE SOVEREIGN

EMBER’S POV

The car climbs for what feels like a year, and I’ve given up asking how much longer somewhere around the second switchback, when the trees finally let go of the road and I see it.

I don’t know what I expected.

Something old, probably.

Something with gargoyles and a moat and a name that sounds like a curse, because that fits the

man whose hand has been wrapped around mine since the plane, like he thinks might evaporate

if he loosens his grip.

What I get instead is black glass and steel stretching out over a bottomless drop. The whole place glows gold from the inside, just hanging there in the dark.

“Okay,” I say. “That’s not a house.”

“It’s home.” His thumb keeps moving over my knuckles. Slow, steady, around and around, the way you’d check a bruise hasn’t gotten worse.

He hasn’t stopped touching me since we got on the plane.

He hasn’t said much either, not since the runway, not since I mentioned Rafael and the warm version of him packed up and left, and this other one moved in. The tense one.

The one who looks at lit windows like he is counting threats in them.

I miss the warm one. I don’t say so.

You don’t tell Knox you’re scared of him going quiet. You just hold his hand back and hope the warm one comes home.

“I’m pretty sure your HOME has its own zip code,” I mutter, staring up at it in sheer, overwhelmed Think I’m going to need a passport just to walk to horror. “And probably a laser defence system.

the front door.”

chest

A low, rough chuckle vibrates in his warm, beautiful sound I haven’t heard since we left

Alaska.

His thumb brushes over my knuckles, and he pulls me a fraction closer to his side, deeply amused by my panic.

“It’s called The Sovereign,” he tells me. “It’s the official seat of the North American Lycan Kings.

OO

10

CHAPTER 273: THE SOVEREIGN

Every generation adds their own glass and steel to the top, but the bones under have been ours for centuries.”

“The Sovereign.” I let it sit on my tongue. “Modest.”

“It’s where the territory comes to kneel,” he says, like that is a normal thing to say about your address. “Every law I’ve ever signed, every pack that’s ever sworn to me, every war I’ve ever ended. It all happens here. The Sovereign is a legacy of a hundred kings.”

“So if I spill wine on the carpet-”

“Then the carpet learns its place.”

I laugh before I can stop myself, and the corner of his mouth tugs, and for a second the warm one

is almost back.

Rayana hadn’t come to the Sovereign with us.

The doctors had been firm about that – the trip had taken too much out of her, and she needed a night in a private facility to stabilize before any transfer could happen.

I’d held her hand in the car to the airport and she’d squeezed back and told me not to make it sentimental, she wasn’t dying tonight, and I’d laughed even though my chest hurt.

She’d be transferred to the estate’s medical wing in the morning.

Queenie had gone with Nathaniel. Not with him the way they used to be there was nothing easy between them anymore, nothing that looked like the marriage I’d watched from the outside and

envied.

She’d walked down the plane stairs without looking back at him, and he’d watched her go with the face of a man who understood he’d earned exactly that.

They’d taken separate cars from the airfield. I didn’t know where she was sleeping tonight and I didn’t think she did either

The car stops.

A man I don’t know opens my door before I’ve found the handle, and I climb out into cold that bites straight through everything I have on.

That’s when I see they are waiting for us.

A whole line of them. Two lines, actually, people in matching dark clothes standing along the entrance like a wedding I haven’t been told I am in, hands folded, faces doing that pleasant blank

thing people do when they’ve been told to look happy and haven’t decided yet whether they mean

10

OOGO

CHAPTER 273. THE SOVEREIGN

I try to count and lose it past a dozen. They go back further than the light does.

And there I am.

Mostly ruffled from the crazy past hours I’ve had in Alaska. Hair out of place. Mismatched socks.

A coat that looked sad even when it was new, and it has not been new in a long time, and every single person in that hall gets a good long look at all of it.

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