TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 378

CHAPTER 304: CARRION MAIDEN OF BULLSHIT

EMBER’S POV

He tilts my chin up.

“So here’s what’s going to happen. You have my entire library at your disposal. Every record this family has ever kept. You have my best teachers, the finest in my territory, and you’ll have them the second you want them. And physical strength? Easy.” His eyes gleam. “I’ll teach you combat myself. Personally. Every dirty trick I know, every way there is to win a fight you have no business winning, because Goddess knows I’ve won enough of those. I will pour everything I am into making you exactly as dangerous as you already secretly are.”

He shakes his head, and there’s something almost fond in it, almost awed.

“Because Sapphire might come from a long line of warriors. Fine. Good for her. But I have never in my entire life met a woman as stubborn, as unrelenting, as flatly impossible to kill as the one in my arms right now. She thinks you’re not worthy of her? She’s got it backwards. She has no idea what she’s been put

inside of.”

His words strike a match against the darkest part of my mind. A sudden, fierce heat flares to life, completely incinerating the heavy doubt Sapphire tried to bury inside me.

And somewhere deep in my chest, I swear the old bitch smirks, almost purring.

“But all the things you praise me for, I didn’t do any of that on my own,” I say, the old reflex, the need to give it away. “The fight with Gale, surviving Rafael that was Sapphire, that was my wolf, I just-” “No.” Come his voice, sharp and immediate. “You channelled Sapphire. That’s not the same. Sapphire didn’t claw your ex-husband’s eyes out, you did, with her power, yes, but with your hands and your rage and your decision. Sapphire or no Sapphire – you screamed. You clawed. You outwitted Rafael Montenegro, a man who has outwitted everyone he’s ever met, and you walked out of that lodge alive. That was you, Ember. The wolf is a weapon. You’re the one who picked it up and swung it.”

His voice goes fierce.

“And let me tell you something else for free, since your wolf’s so obsessed with power. Power is overrated when it’s got nothing behind it. When it’s got no heart, no empathy, no love, it’s just a weapon waiting to go off in the wrong direction. I mean, look at Nathaniel. No offence. You know what you have that she’s apparently too ancient and too proud to value? All of it. Every bit of what actually matters. You just need the right hand guiding you.” He leans in, and his voice drops to something low and electric. “And Ember Aragon – if you’ll let me – it would be my immense, genuine pleasure to show your Carrion Maiden of Bullshit that she has absolutely no idea what you’re made of.”

I’m crying again, but it’s different now, and I’m half-laughing too.

“In fact,” Knox adds, “fuck Sapphire.”

CHAPTER 304 PARTION MANDENEOF BULLSHE Laosp. “Knux.”

“What?”

“You can’t – you can’t just say that, what if she-” I clap a hand over my own mouth, glancing wildly around the candlelit room as though she might come pouring out of the walls. “You can’t say that about her, she’s right here, she’s inside me, she’ll—”

“She’ll what?” Knox rolls his eyes, utterly unbothered. “Sulk? Let her suik. Cry a bloody river? Set us on fire? Fuck Sapphire. No one talks about my girl like that. I don’t care if she’s an ancient wolf older than the entire continent. She respects you or she takes it up with me.” He tilts his head, considering, and then, conversationally, to the room at large: “You hear that, Sapphire? Fuck you. Respect fry woman or we’re going to have a problem.”

A beat.

Somewhere deep in my chest, where she is, there’s a flicker of something. Outrage, maybe. Or amusement. Either way, I brace for – I don’t know what.

Lightning. The room to catch fire. My own eyes to flood silver and Sapphire to come roaring up out of me to defend her honour.

Nothing happens.

“Even Phantom agrees,” Knox says smugly, tapping his own chest. “He says, and I’m translating loosely from a great deal of growling: no one disrespects our máte, scary wolf or not. So that’s two of us. We’re united on this. Fuck Sapphire.”

And I lose it.

I dissolve into laughter, real laughter, the helpless kind that bends you in half, the kind I haven’t done in what feels like years, and Knox is grinning down at me looking enormously pleased with himself.

The candles flicker, and the absurd beautiful enormity of being loved like this, defended like this, against an ancient wolf inside my own body, by a man who has decided the appropriate response to my divine inheritance insulting me is to start a fight with it on my behalf – it’s too much.

It’s perfect.

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