TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 348

CHAPTER 275 HALE VOLKOV

CHAPTER 275: HALE VOLKOV

EMBER’S POV

Something flickers across Hale’s face. It comes too fast, and its gone before I can name it, smoothed over with that bright, blinking pleasantness, like a stone dropping into water and the surface going still again right after.

“Your wife,” she says, and gives a little laugh, high and quick. “Well. Isn’t that something. Isn’t that just-something.” She clasps her hands under her chin. “She’s so small, Knox. Look at her little face. Where did you find her?”

I open my mouth, but Knox gets there first, and his voice has cooled a few degrees.

“Ember, this is Hale. My cousin, on my father’s side.” He says it the way you’d hand someone a fact to hold. “Her branch of the family lived here when we were children, before they travelled out east. She came back years ago. She’s helped keep the house since.”

“Helped keep it.” Hale’s laugh again, that little glassy chime. “He makes it sound so small. I’ve kept this house breathing while he was off being terrifying all over the continent. Somebody had to. A house this grand doesn’t run on its own, does it, Marjorie?”

“It runs on the forty people you don’t thank,” Marjorie says, perfectly pleasant, not looking at her.

Hale’s smile twitches at one corner.

“Marjorie’s tired. She gets sharp when she’s tired.”

The whole exchange takes maybe ten seconds, and I understand none of the currents under it, only that there are currents, that this old beautiful floating house has a weather system I’ve just walked into the middle of.

The word cousin, however, hits me like a bucket of cold water, instantly putting out a fire I don’t

want to admit has started.

Cousin. Family,

I let out a breath I didn’t realise I was holding. Because for a second there, watching her smooth her hands over his chest and call him by a pet name, the jealousy had been blinding.

I was already calculating how fast I could rip those perfect pins out of her hair. I was braced for the ex, the mistress, the flawlessly composed rival.

But she’s just family. And family does that. Family oversteps and stakes proprietary claims.

I mentally talk myself off the ledge. I tell the ugly, territorial knot in my chest to untie itself, and I let

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CHAPTER 275 HALE VOLKOV

my shoulders come down half an inch.

She’s just his cousin. It’s nice seeing someone else related to him.

Knox doesn’t give the weather time to do anything else. He turns to Marjorie, and his whole register changes, the cool sliding back into warm.

“Hold everything till morning,” he says. “No reports, no calls, no household matter. I’m taking my fiancée upstairs to get the long flight off her. She’s running on nothing and so am I.”

“Of course.” Marjorie squeezes my hand one last time. “I’ll send something hot up. Don’t argue, she adds, when I start to. “You’ll eat it, or I’ll be insulted, and I’m small, but I hold a grudge.”

“She does,” Knox says gravely. “It’s terrifying.”

And then he bends down.

“Don’t,” I say, already knowing. “Don’t you dare, there are forty people-

Too late.

JR

He scoops me clean off my feet, one arm under my knees, one at my back, jet-lagged and a sad coat and all of it lifted up against his chest like I weigh nothing, and the noise I make gets

swallowed into his collar.

Then, because apparently I haven’t been humiliated thoroughly enough, he turns, one slow spin right there in the entrance hall with me in his arms, and the line of staff actually makes a sound, a

soft delighted ohh that rolls down the row.

“Knox!”

“They wanted to meet their queen.” He is grinning into my hair now, the real grin, the rare one.

Now they have. Say goodnight, Ember.”

“I will end you,” I tell the room.

The young maid at the end of the line laughs

He carries me toward the stairs.

out loud and slaps a hand over her mouth.

Behind us, Marjorie is back to happy tears, bossing someone around about blankets.

I can’t see Hale anymore, but I can still feel her.

She leaves behind a cold, flat silence-like a held breath at the bottom of the stairs that refuses to

exhale, even after wo

climb out of sight.

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