TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 359

CHAPTER 286. WELL DONE

CHAPTER 286: WELL DONE

EMBER’S POV

She checked on me. Twice. In the night. In the room with the tended fire, the room I share with Knox, the room she walked into uninvited last night.

I look at her, and she’s already moved on, fussing with a teapot, completely unbothered, and I tell myself there are a dozen normal explanations and not one of them makes the crawl on the back of my neck lie back down.

I’m still sitting with that when the young nervous maid reaches across to set down a dish and catches the edge of Hale’s tray with her sleeve, and one of the muffins tips, and rolls, and drops onto the floor with a soft thud.

The room changes temperature.

“Oh, you stupid-” Hale’s voice comes out fast and low and absolutely nothing like the cooing thing she’s been using on me all morning, and her hand shoots out and closes around the girl’s wrist hard

enough that the girl gasps. “Do you have any idea how long those took? Do you have the first idea

what I-”

“It was an accident,” I say.

I don’t decide to say it.

It’s just out of my mouth, the way these things are always out of my mouth a half-second before my brain signs off on them, and the whole room turns to look at me – Marjorie, the two maids, Hale with her fingers still wrapped white-knuckled around a nineteen-year-old’s wrist.

“It was an accident,” I say again, steadier, holding Hale’s eyes. “It’s a muffin. There are forty more. Let her go.”

For one long beat nobody breathes.

Then something moves behind Hale’s face – that flat cold thing I saw at dinner, surfacing and submerging again so fast I could almost believe I imagined it.

And the brightness slams back down over it like a lid, and she lets go of the girl’s wrist and laughs, light and easy, like the last ten seconds simply did not occur.

“Of course it was. Listen to me, getting in a state over a muffin, what’s wrong with me this morning. She pats the girl’s shoulder, the girl flinches and tries to hide that she flinched. “Go on, sweet, no harm done. Pick it up and off you go.”

CHAPTER 286 WELL DONE

She turns the laugh on me.

“You see? This is exactly what Knox needs around here. Someone soft. I’m all hard edges, I always have been, I forget myself.” She says it like a compliment to me.

It does not feel like a compliment.

The girl scoops the muffin and flees.

The one who laughed last night catches my eye on her way out and gives me a small fierce look can’t read – grateful, maybe, or warning, I genuinely can’t tell – and then she’s gone too.

Marjorie waits until Hale has swept off toward the kitchen on some errand of her own.

Then she comes around the table and refills my tea, which I haven’t touched and says, very quietly, without looking at me:

“That was well done.”

“It was just a muffin.”

“It wasn’t, and you know it wasn’t, and that’s why it was well done.” She sets the pot down. Her eyes flick once to the doorway Hale left through, then back. “That girl’s been jumpy for weeks. They all have, in this wing. I keep telling myself it’s nothing.”

She doesn’t finish the thought. She squeezes my shoulder instead, brisk, and changes the subject so smoothly I almost miss the seam.

“Now. The King left before light. He asked me to tell you he didn’t want to wake you.”

My stupid heart does its stupid thing.

“Did he say where he went?”

“Down to the south offices. Said something about a-” Marjorie’s mouth purses like she’s tasting something off. “A cockroach. Said he’d found one and needed to deal with it before it bred.” She shakes her head. “I don’t pretend to understand the man’s metaphors. Eat your eggs.”

But I understand the metaphor.

I understand it instantly, completely, the way you understand a cold draft means a door’s come open somewhere.

A cockroach.

Something that survives what should have killed it. Something you thought you’d crushed that turns up alive in the dark, breeding.

CHAPTER 286 WELL DONE

He’s not talking about an insect. He’s talking about a man with ten surgeons, and no confirmed

body, and the cold settles into my stomach right next to the eggs I’m not going to be able to eat now, because I’m the one who told him.

I’m the one who told him on that plane that Rafael might still be alive.

I watched the warm version of him pack up and disappear, replaced by a King who has been

awake since before dawn, hunting a cockroach.

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