TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 362

CHAPTER 289 LONG, MISERABLE VERSION

CHAPTER 289: LONG, MISERABLE VERSION

EMBER’S POV

I stare at her. The heartbreak I felt a second ago burns away, leaving behind a cold, sudden clarity. ! am looking at exactly what I refuse to become.

“If you were right,” I say quietly, “I would be dead.”

Hale pauses. She breaks the gun open over her arm again, her head tilting in curiosity.

“I was the weak thing,” I tell her, holding my ground. “I was the one without fangs, without money

without power. By your logic, I should have just laid down and let the predators have me. But I

didn’t lose. Because survival isn’t about deciding to become the boot that steps on people.”

Hale’s smile twitches. Just a fraction.

“You look at the weak, and you kill them because looking at them reminds you of how helpless you used to feel,” I continue, keeping my voice dead-level and absolutely steady. “You aren’t doing them a favour. You’re just trying to kill the part of yourself you hate. And if this is how you run things when you’re in charge, it’s a very good thing that Knox intends to change who’s in charge around

here.”

Silence stretches over the frost.

Hale’s round eyes go flat and dark for one terrifying second. Then, the bright, blinking pleasantness folds right back over her face.

“My she breathes, a delighted little laugh escaping her. “You do have teeth. How exciting for us.” She smooths her coat with her free hand, light as air, and then covers a delicate, theatrical yawn. “Well. The shooting has gotten terribly boring anyway,” she sighs, waving a careless hand toward the woods. “I think I’ll go inside and have Marjorie put a kettle on. Do excuse me, Lady Ember.”

She’s already walking, already moving past me toward the glass doors, and she pauses just once, light as anything, and nods at the grass behind me.

“That last one’s not dead, by the way. I winged it. They take an age, sometimes. You might want to go back inside so you don’t have to deal with the horror of watching a weak thing die.”

Her tone is mocking.

Then she slips back into the estate, leaving me alone in the cold.

I don’t want to look. I look.

CHAPTER 289 LONG MISERABLE VERSION

It lies a few feet away in the frozen grass. A dove. It is soft and grey-brown, but its body is completely broken. One wing is splayed backwards at a brutal, unnaturai angle.

Its tiny chest stutters, heaving in fast, panicked jerks. Its dark eye is wide open. Staring at nothing. Staring at me.

It is doing the exact thing small, dying creatures do-waiting in uncomprehending terror for the pain to finally stop.

The long, miserable version.

And something in me just… breaks open.

I’m on my knees in the frost before I’ve decided to be.

The cold soaks through my robe instantly, but I don’t care.

I cup my hands around the small, broken body. It’s so light it weighs almost nothing.

It is barely anything at all-just a fragile scrap of warmth and terror coming apart in my palms.

I think about Maurice on the storage room floor. I remember the way the thing inside me answered when I sobbed, the way it poured out of me and dragged him back across the line by sheer force.

And I think… I can do this.

This is so much smaller than a man. If I can do that, I can do this. If I can do this, I can somehow figure out Rayana.

I close my eyes, and I reach for it.

I don’t know how. I’ve never known how.

With Maurice it wasn’t a technique, it was a wail, it was grief so big it tore the house apart, and I

don’t have the grief now, but I have the wanting, the furious wanting.

Live, you’re going to live, I’ve got you, live.

And I reach down into my own chest for the wolf that sleeps there, and I grab her with both hands,

and I pull.

It comes.

At first, it works. A small, wet laugh of disbelief escapes my throat. The erratic, terrified flutter of its heart steadies against my palms, and the cold recedes.

It’s working. Oh, praise the goddess, I’m doing it.

But the connection falters.

O

CHAPTER 289 LONG, NISERABLE VERSION

Goddess help me, it all comes too fast.

It’s a flood of something strange and completely beyond me, hitting me all at once with nowhere

to go.

The bird is so incredibly small. The massive, raw power that dragged a grown man back from death is pouring into a body the size of my cupped hands, and I have absolutely no idea how to

make it smaller.

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