TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 363

CHAPTER 290 BETWEEN YOU OR RAYANA

CHAPTER 290: BETWEEN YOU OR RAYANA

EMBER’S POV

The dove’s beak snaps open, and it lets out a painful, hawking shriek-a wet, bubbling rasp of pure agony that no bird should be able to make.

I try to drop it, but I can’t let go. My fingers are paralysed, locked around it by the sheer force of the gold.

The air scorches, thick with the smell of burnt ozone and roasting feathers. The dead grass around my knees bursts into smoking flames.

I am pouring my life out into a dead thing, and the pressure is literally shaking it apart, its hollow

bones cracking and pulverising as it twists into a shape that should not exist.

“EMBER.”

The roar of the world crashes back over me.

Knox hits me from behind, his large hands clamping over my glowing ones.

He flinches violently at the blistering heat of my skin, but he refuses to let go. He crushes his chest against my back, grounding me just like he did in the storage room.

“Let it go. Ember, drop it. Drop it right now. Come back to me. Follow me back-”

He uses the bond.

It’s a desperate, heavy tether pulling me out of the dark, pulling right from my soul. The gold magic

shudders.

It resists for half a second before collapsing backwards, sinking into my chest like a dying star.

I take a massive, ragged gasp. The flames vanish. The scorched lawn stops hissing. I am just a bleeding, shivering woman on her knees, holding something still smoking in her palms.

I look down.

The dove is dead. Of course it’s dead.

But it is completely obliterated-worse than wing-shot, worse than anything Hale’s gun could have done. Its small body is a blackened, pulverised husk, burnt from the inside out.

It has nothing to do with natural violence, and everything to do with whatever I just forced into its veins. The sight of it punches the air from my lungs.

CHAPTER 299 BETWEEN YOU OR RAYARA

I didn’t save it. I didn’t give it life. I gave it an uncontrollable fire, and that fire destroyed it far more completely and horribly than it would have died on its own in the cold.

I did exactly what Hale said. I gave it the long version. I gave it worse.

“Oh,” I say, my voice very small. “Oh, no,”

“Look at me.” Knox turns me around in his arms, his hands on my face, his thumbs swiping at the blood under my eyes, and his face – his face is a thing I’ve never seen, white and stark and afraid; the fear under the fury is brewing hot. “Look at me. Are you with me? Ember. Say something.”

“I was trying to help it.” It comes out cracked. “It was suffering and I just – I thought I could-”

“You were bleeding out of your eyes.” His voice is shaking. The Lycan King’s voice is shaking. “I felt it from across the grounds when I came in. I felt your magic go off like a bomb. I have never run that fast in my life. I came out, and you were-you were gone, Ember. You weren’t behind your own eyes. You were on your knees, burning a hole in the lawn, and you didn’t hear me when I screamed

your name so many times.”

He stops. He presses his forehead to mine, hard, and I can feel how much he’s trembling. This

enormous, unbreakable man is trembling.

“You promised me. You promised you’d leave the worrying to me. Just once.”

“I wasn’t looking for trouble,” I say, and I hear my own voice harden. I wipe at my face, my hand coming away smeared with hot blood, because under the shame and the horror, there’s something else now. “It was dying in the grass. And Rayana is dying in your medical wing. I needed to see if I

could do it.”

Knox goes entirely still. He pulls back just enough to look at me, and then he looks down at the smoking, pulverised lump of ash in the grass.

“You were practicing,” he breathes. The realisation hits him like a physical blow. And then, the fear in his eyes snaps into absolute, white-hot fury. “You used a dying bird as a test run.”

“I promised her I would heal her!” I shout, stepping back from him, my chest heaving. “I promised I would save her, Knox! But I don’t know how this works! I needed to practice. I needed to learn-” “Learn?” He gestures violently at the charred remains of the dove. “Look at that, Ember! Look at what you did to it! This isn’t learning! This is proof! You can’t do this!”

“I can’t do it yet!”

“Yet?” It comes out of him as a roar, the Lycan gold flooding his eyes completely. “There is no yet! What if I hadn’t made it out here in time? What if I was five minutes slower? You would have burned this entire lawn to ash with you in the centre of it! You are literally hurting yourself! You are

CHAPTER 290: BETWEEN YOU OR RAYANA

bleeding from your fucking eyes, Ember!”

“I don’t care!” I yell back, matching his volume, matching his desperation. “I am not letting Rayana die coughing up black blood when I have the power to stop it! I made a promise-

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