TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 355

CHAPTER 282: BREATHE, KNOX

CHAPTER 282: BREATHE, KNOX

KNOX’S POV

Ember falls asleep mid-sentence.

One moment she is saying something about the cousin, and the next her voice goes soft and

trailing, and her breathing evens out, and she is gone, just like that, the way only someone running

on nothing can sleep.

Like a light switching off.

I lie there in the dark and listen to her breathe.

The Sovereign settles around us the way it always does at this hour-the old beams contracting in the cold, the distant rush of the gorge echoing far below.

I know every sound this house makes. I catalogued them on the nights I couldn’t sleep after moving from Zruch. After my dad died.

After I killed him.

Back then, memorising those noises was the difference between a bad night and a worse one.

It was how I learned to tell the difference between the house talking to itself, and the sound of something coming for me.

Thirty-odd years and I still do it without thinking-still map every creak and draft and silence, still file them, still know in my sleep when something is wrong.

The house is not right tonight.

It hasn’t been right since I crossed the threshold. Thirty days, That’s how long I’ve been gone. What could have possibly gone this wrong in a single month?

I can’t place it, can’t name the change, but the unease is a restless, keeping Phantom prowling in the back of my mind-a primal hunger waiting to sniff out the rot inside my own walls.

I don’t move.

Ember’s hair is under my chin, and her breathing is slow, and I keep my arm where it is, banded across her middle.

I stare at the ceiling and think about everything I haven’t let myself think about on the plane.

Rafael.

CHAPTER 282 BREATHE, KNOX

The name sits in my chest like a coal. Not dead. Possibly not dead. Ten surgeons in the middle of the night and a body no one has confirmed.

I told myself I buried him, but I didn’t. I left things to fate, and right now fate is laughing to my fucking face.

I knew turning my back didn’t mean he was dead-I knew the bastard was likely still alive and healing somewhere-but I ignored it.

I ignored it because there is only so much a man can carry at one time.

And now, Ember might be in danger. And this time, the blood will be squarely on my hands.

Breathe, Knox.

I force the panic down and ground myself in the physical reality of her.

She is here. Right now. In my house. In my bed. Breathing slow and even against my bare chest.

That has to mean something.

It has to stand for the possibility of a real future for us-a hard-fought happily ever after.

I just have to do everything in my power to keep the world off her back, to make sure she doesn’t run herself completely empty before I can finally give it to her.

And somewhere out there, Rafael is either dead or he isn’t, and that not-knowing has teeth.

But if he isn’t dead-if that fucking pest of a man is still breathing, if his heart is still beating somewhere on this earth-I am going to rip it out of his chest with my bare hands.

I will hunt him down, strip the flesh from his bones while he watches, and tear out his throat with

my own teeth.

I will make his final hours last a lifetime. Because somehow, Ember has become the one thing I cannot afford to lose. Which means she has become the target.

The exact thing someone already knows they can use against me.

I press my mouth to the back of her neck and breathe her in, and Phantom goes quiet for a

moment, just a moment, the way it only ever goes quiet for her.

Keep her safe, is all it has. Keep her here. Keep her breathing.

Working on it, I think. Working on it.

Lease out of the bed just before four.

She doesn’t wake. She makes a small sound and reaches for the warm space I’ve left, finds a

CHAPTER 282 BREATHE, KNOX

pillow, and pulls it in instead.

Something in my chest does something I am not going to examine. I pull the covers up over her shoulder and stand there for longer than is strictly necessary, watching her sleep in my house like she has always belonged in it.

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