TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 353

CHAPTER 280: WELCOME, LADY EMBER

EMBER’S POV

I just stare at her.

I am desperately trying to find a polite, socially acceptable response to the fact that his cousin just asked about our sex life, but my brain has completely short-circuited.

I don’t understand her gameplay. I don’t understand the rules of whatever twisted, psychological chess match she is playing, but the sheer, unblinking avidity in her eyes makes my skin crawl.

Knox’s silverware hits the table with a sharp, violent crack.

“Shut your fucking mouth, Hale.” His voice is laced with such a pure, creeping disgust that the temperature in the room instantly plummets. He looks genuinely repulsed by her. “If you ever speak about what happens behind my bedroom doors again, I will have you physically thrown out of this house.”

Hale doesn’t even flinch. She just gives a little chiming laugh, completely unbothered by his rage.

“Oh, don’t be a prude, Knoxie. We’re all adults here. I just want to know everything about the girl who finally caught you.” She tilts her head, her gaze sweeping over me again, cataloguing me like a doll to see if I am the good kind or the cheap kind. “You have such an interesting face. Doesn’t she have an interesting face, Knox? Not pretty exactly, but interesting. Like something that might be valuable if you cleaned it up. Are those your real teeth?”

“Hale.”

“What? It’s a compliment!” She reaches across the candles before I understand what she is doing

and pinches my chin between two cool fingers, turning my face an inch to the side like she is

checking it in better light. I freeze, every hair on my body standing up. “Such a little thing. He likes them little, I suppose. Easy to lose. Do you know, I once had a doll exactly this colour-”

Knox’s hand closes around her wrist and rips it off my face.

He doesn’t break it. I genuinely think, for one second, that he is going to break it.

The candles jump. The gold swallows his eyes whole, and the growl that comes out of him isn’t a

sound a person makes.

But Hale just looks at his hand on her wrist with that same bright untroubled smile, like he is holding her hand at a dance.

“Do not,” he says, very quietly, “touch her again.”

CHAPTER 280 WELCOME, LADY EMBER

“You’re no fun anymore.” She says it almost fondly. She doesn’t pull her wrist back. She lets him hold it, looking up at him through her lashes, and her voice drops into something almost sad, almost sweet, and so much worse for it. “You used to be fun, cous. Before. We had such fun, the two of us, in this house. And now you come home all teeth, snapping at me over a little thing with mismatched socks.” A tiny pout. “Has she done that to you? Already? Made you so serious?”

“There’s nothing little about my wife.” Knox sets her wrist down on the table the way you’d set down something you didn’t want to be holding. “And you will speak about her with respect or you will not speak about her at all. Pick one. Now.”

Hale’s smile twitches, but she just sighs, rubbing her wrist with a delicate, condescending grace

“You shouldn’t speak to me like this, Knox. I’ve kept this house breathing while you were away, I run things here.”

“You don’t run a goddamn thing.” Knox’s voice rings with absolute, lethal authority. The Lycan King is fully awake now. “You are a guest at this table. You are a guest under this roof. From the second she crossed the threshold, Ember became the Lady of this house. My staff answers to her. This territory answers to her. And so do you.”

Hale’s smile freezes. For the first time all night, that glassy, perfect facade cracks, and something under it goes flat and cold.

I don’t know where the courage comes from. Maybe it’s the exhaustion, or the residual adrenaline

from Alaska, or the protective weight of Knox sitting right beside me.

But I finally find my voice.

I don’t shrink back. I lean forward, locking eyes with her across the flickering candles.

“He’s right,” I say, keeping my voice dead-level. “I don’t know how things worked before I got here. But I’m here now. And if you ever spy on us again, or touch me without my permission, I won’t wait for Knox to break your wrist. I will do it myself.”

Silence crashes over the dining room.

Beside me, the tension rolling off Knox shifts. The feral rage recedes just a fraction, replaced instantly by a dark, vibrating hum of absolute pride.

Hale looks at me. Really looks at me. The condescending indulgence is gone, replaced by a sharp,

calculating stare.

Then, faster than I can process, the bright, blinking pleasantness folds right back over her features. “Of course,” Hale says, rising slowly from her chair and smoothing her skirts, light as anything. Forgive me. I’m tired. I get silly when I’m tired, Marjorie’s always saying.” She drifts toward the door,

CHAPTER 280 WELCOME, LADY EMBER

then pauses, looking back at me over her shoulder.

The smile she gives me this time is sweet as sugar, and entirely venomous.

“Welcome home, Lady Ember. We’re going to be such good friends, you and I. I can feel it.”

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