TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 357

UMAPTER 284 THE STRANGE COUSIN-1

CHAPTER 284: THE STRANGE COUSIN-1

KNOX’S POV

I sit in the quiet for a long time after that, turning Marjorie’s words over in my head.

She has run this house since before I was King. She keeps the staff in line, serves as a materna figure to half the people under this roof, and she does not panic over shadows. If she says something is wrong, it is.

And then there is my cousin, Hale.

I wish I could say there was a time when she wasn’t so strange, but she has been exactly like this

since the day I moved to the Sovereign. Despite her bizarre fixations, we have never been close. We are dining companions, nothing more, speaking only when the affairs of running the estate

demand it.

She was close to Celeste. Some might have even called them best friends when my late wife was

still alive.

But even that doesn’t explain this. Grief doesn’t explain putting on a dead woman’s clothes and dancing alone in the dark. And it sure as fuck doesn’t explain casually opening a bathroom door to watch me take my woman in the shower.

I drag a heavy hand down my face, exhaling a long sigh.

I told Ember it was nothing. Family is odd. That’s all that is.

I told Ember that because she needed to believe it tonight, because I needed her to sleep, and because there are only so many threats a person can hold in the first twenty-four hours of arriving somewhere new.

But the study is empty, Marjorie is gone, and Ember is asleep three floors up with the impression of my arm still deep in the pillow. I can be honest in here.

It isn’t nothing.

It hasn’t been nothing for a while. I’ve been choosing not to see it because she is family, because she has been here and useful, and because the alternative means dealing with something I simply do not have the bandwidth for.

Is Hale going to be a real problem, or not? For as long as I’ve known her, she has been harmless-a nuisance, at worst, entirely childish with her gimmicks and little games. Is that all this is? Just her twisted, invasive way of testing Ember and ushering her into this new life?

CHAPTER 284, THE STRANGE COUSIN-1

The knock at the study door is four raps this time. A different pattern. Lighter.

I already know.

“Come in, Hale.”

She comes in the way she always comes into rooms-like she’s been invited, like she’s been expected, like the space rearranges itself around her rather than the other way around.

She is still dressed. Of course she is. She probably never went to bed.

“You’re up late,” she says, brightly, and sits in the chair Marjorie just left, folding herself into it with the ease of a woman who has sat in that chair a hundred times. Which she has. “I saw the light under the door.”

“You were in the corridor at four in the morning.”

“I couldn’t sleep.” She shrugs, small and easy. Then she tilts her head, her round eyes softening into

something sickeningly sweet. “Did you even miss me, Knoxie? All those weeks away in the ice and snow, and you barely gave me a proper hello. I missed you.”

“I was working, Hale.”

“Working already. You never change.” She examines her own fingers, lightly, the way you’d examine something that didn’t particularly concern you. “Don’t mind Marjorie, by the way. I know she talks. She always has-it’s her great flaw. She sees something that confuses her and she has to put breathless, important-sounding words to it immediately. I hope she didn’t put ideas in your head.”

“Ideas about what?”

“Oh, you know.” A vague wave of her hand. “The maids in the east wing. The weird stuff. Whatever she thinks she knows.” Hale gives a soft, pitying sigh, looking at me with wide, innocent eyes. “She always leaves out the context, doesn’t she? Did she happen to mention that those exact three maids crossed her just two weeks ago? Refused her orders on the estate schedules right in front of the kitchen staff?”

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CHAPTER 284 THE STRANGE COUSIN-2

CHAPTER 284: THE STRANGE COUSIN-2

I don’t react. I let her speak.

“And I’m sure it’s purely a coincidence,” Hale continues, her voice dropping into a conspiratorial whisper, “that our dear, sweet Marjorie cultivates a very healthy, very private garden of foxglove, monkshood, and deadly nightshade right behind the greenhouse. But I suppose it’s easier to blame the strange cousin for a few sick girls than look in her own backyard. I know Marjorie has never liked me. She never failed to make that evident in your absence. Such a bully.”

She smiles then. Perfectly pleasant. Perfectly lethal. It is a brilliant, terrifyingly plausible deflection, and it reminds me exactly how sharp the mind behind that glassy stare really is.

“You have nothing to worry about with me, Knox,” she murmurs, leaning forward. “Do you not trust me? Have I ever done anything but keep this house breathing for you?”

“How did you get into my wing tonight?” I ask, ignoring her game entirely.

“The west service door. It sticks, you know, you really ought to have someone look at it-it doesn’t latch properly, and anyone could just push it open.” She says it helpfully. “I’ll have maintenance look at it in the morning.”

“Do that.”

“I will.” She rises, unhurried, smoothing the front of her dress. “She seems sweet, your future wife.

A little rough around the edges, obviously, but that’s just polish she hasn’t had yet.” Hale pauses near the corner of my desk, her eyes glinting in the firelight. “She is absolutely nothing like Celeste,

is she?”

The name drops into the room like a stone.

“Celeste was so refined,” Hale muses, a tiny, razor-sharp smile playing on her lips. “So delicate. This one looks like she’d tear a throat out. I wonder how she’ll fare in a house like this.”

She crosses toward me and reaches out. Before I can stop her, her fingers are in my hair, light and quick, pulling a strand free between two fingers with a small satisfied sound.

My hand closes around her wrist.

She stills.

I bring her hand down from my hair, slowly, and hold her wrist between us. I look at her-really look at her, past the brightness and the pleasantness and the thirty years of a face I’ve known since childhood-and I say it quietly, the way I say the things I mean.

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CHAPTER 284 THE STRANGE COUSIN-2

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