TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 361

1K

CHAPTER 288 SHOOTING BIRDS

CHAPTER 288: SHOOTING BIRDS

EMBER’S POV

That’s the thought I leave the medical wing with. It follows me through the great, cold halls of a house I still don’t know my way around.

More or less by accident, I find a set of glass doors and push through them, stepping out into a grey morning and a wide frozen lawn that drops away toward the tree line.

I need air. I need to think.

I need to figure out how a woman reaches a thing that lives inside her own chest and refuses to come when called, and I’m so deep in it that I’m halfway across the lawn before I register the sound.

The sharp, unmistakable blast of a gunshot rings out.

Then another.

Hale is standing at the edge of the lawn where it meets the trees. An open shotgun rests across

her forearm.

She loads the shells with the unbothered competence of a woman who’s done it ten thousand

times. At her feet is a small heap of something I don’t let myself look at directly yet.

C

“There you are,” she calls, bright as anything. “Come keep me company. It’s dull, shooting alone.”

Every sensible instinct I have says go back inside. Every one.

But the alternative is the cold empty house and the doctor’s closed door and my own screaming clock, and at least out here there’s a person, even if the person is her, so I cross the frozen grass

toward Hale and her gun.

“I didn’t know you hunted,” I say.

“There’s a great deal you don’t know about me.” She snaps the gun closed, and smiles at me over it. “We’ll fix that. Stand here, the kick’ll knock you flat if you stand there.”

I stand where she tells me.

Up close, the small heap at her feet resolves into what I knew it would be and didn’t want it to be — birds, three of them, soft brown bodies gone wrong-angled and still on the frost.

Something in me flinches hard.

“Pigeons?” My voice comes out thinner than I want.

GC

CHAPTER 288 SHOOTING BIRDS

“Doves, mostly. Pigeons if I’m not fussy.” She raises the gun, tracks something in the grey sky! can’t see, and doesn’t fire. She lowers it again. “You’re upset.”

“No, I-“I am. I’m upset. They’re so small. “It’s fine. It’s your land, you can-”

“You’re upset.” She says it like she finds it interesting. “You’ve got a whole face for it. Knox has it too, did you know? That little pinch right here.” She touches her own brow. “He used to get it asja boy, when the hunts went out, and the dogs brought things back. He grew out of it. You learn, in a house like this, in a life like this. You learn that being soft about small dying things is a luxury, and luxuries get you killed.”

There’s something under the lightness now., I can feel it, the way you can feel a current under flat

water.

“I don’t think kindness is a luxury,” I say.

“No, you wouldn’t.” She glances at me, and for a moment the brightness thins and something almost real shows through-something that’s been watching me since I walked out of those doors. “Let me guess. Hard childhood. The kind where nobody came when you cried, so you decided very young that you’d be the one who comes. The hero. The one who saves things. The one who stands between the small soft creatures and the boot.” Her mouth curves. “Am I close?”

I don’t answer. I don’t have to. She reads it off my face, and her smile widens like she’s won something.

“I knew it,” she says, almost gentle. “I knew it the second I saw you. We’re the same, you and I. Did

you know that? Same start. Mine was-well. Mine had a terrible father who was very good with his

hands and very bad with his temper, and a mother who learned to be somewhere else, and a house where the safest thing you could be was invisible and small. I moved back here because Knox was the one part of my life that has always felt safe. Where I didn’t have to cower into a smaller version of myself. He respected me. He gave me a place in his home. And he trusted me to take care of it when Celeste passed.” She snaps the gun closed. “You could almost say he saved us both. We just went different directions with it, that’s all.”

My heart understood her words. The rigidness of her shoulders and a true survivor of a tragedy that should have ended her. Just like me.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify