TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 397

EMBER’S POV

“How’s my money?” he says, by way of hello, and I can hear the smile in

“It’s having a wonderful time. It’s making so many new friends.” I watch, across the shop, gravely considering two different enormous ugly vases. “Don’t go in the dining room when you get home.”

A pause. “Why would I not go to the dining room?”

“No reason. The gnomes are having a meeting, and it would be rude to interrupt.”

“… The what.”

“Love you, checking in, everything’s fine, bye.”

I hang up on the sound of him starting to ask a question, and cackles, and one of the guards – Reyes, I’ve finally sorted them, Reyes is the one whose left eyebrow does a thing when he’s suffering – makes a small pained sound behind us.

“Problem?” asks him sweetly.

–

“His Majesty,” Reyes says, with the careful diction of a man choosing his words very carefully, “is going to ask us why we permitted the gnomes”

“And you’re going to tell him you’re a bodyguard, not a gnome guard, and it wasn’t in your job description.” pats his enormous arm. “Stay strong, Reyes. You’re doing beautifully. Hold these.” She hands him four shopping bags. He takes them the way you’d take a five grenade.

And then–then- eyes land on something across the shop, and she goes very still, and she gasps, the gasp of a woman who has found her life’s purpose.

“No,” I say, before I even see it.

“Ember.”

“Whatever it is, no.”

“Ember.” She grabs my shoulders and physically turns me to face it, and I am confronted, in the back corner of a tasteful home–goods boutique, with a statue.

It is a sculpture.

Marble, or something pretending to be marble. It is abstract, the saleswoman will later insist, abstract, a study in form, a celebration of the human figure.

It is six feet tall. It is, unmistakably, undeniably, in a way that no amount of the word abstract could ever

paper over, a phallus.

A monumental one. A phallus on the scale of civic architecture, the kind of thing you’d erect in a town

WASTINE CLARY ESECTION

square to commemorate a war.

For Tack of better words, it is a giant p***s.

“We have to,” whispers, reverent. “Ember. Look at it. Look at it. We have to send it to the house.”

“We cannot send that to the house.”

“For the garden. By the front gate. So it’s the first thing every dignitary and council member and visiting alpha sees when they come to grovel before the King.” She has tears in her eyes. She is so happy.” Imagine the meetings, Ember. Imagine Knox trying to negotiate a treaty and there’s just a giant erection visible through the window over the man’s shoulder.”

Reyes makes a sound like a dying engine.

I look at the statue. I look at shining hopeful face.

I think about Knox spinning me in the entrance hall in front of forty staff, about the fake home invasion, about waking up screaming because the love of my life thought a fabricated death threat was a fun way to start the day.

“Get the statue,” I say.

whoops.

The saleswoman, who has clearly decided we are eccentric foreign royalty and that it is not her place to

interfere with the affairs of eccentric foreign royalty, arranges for the immediate delivery and prominent

placement of one six–foot marble p***s at the front gate of the Sovereign.

I hand over the black card, and somewhere in a study across the city, I imagine Knox feeling a small cold

premonition and not knowing why.

It’s outside, on the street, that whole energy shifts.

We’re walking to the next street over, the guards laden like pack mules behind us, and she’s mid–sentence about something, and then she just — slows and goes quiet.

I follow her gaze and see what stopped her: an ordinary thing, a man and a woman across the street, arguing the way couples argue, low and intense.

And then the man reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind the woman’s ear, mid–fight, an old unconscious tender thing, and the woman lets him, still angry, still loving him, both at once.

And face does something it hasn’t done all day, something the brightness has been holding the door shut

against.

“Hey.” I touch her arm. “You okay?”

“Mm.” She blinks fast and pulls the smile back up, but it’s a beat too slow this time. “Fine. Yes. Where to

next, I think there’s a-”

“Ducente”

We’re not doing this.” She says it quietly. “Don’t do the voice. The soft one. If you do the soft voice, I’m going to cry in the street and ruin my whole face, and I did a very good face today.”

“I just-” I stop. I make myself slow down. “We don’t have to talk about him, I just want you to know you

can. That’s all.”

She’s quiet for a moment, looking at the couple across the street, who’ve stopped arguing now and are walking away with his arm around her.

“The truth?” she says finally, very low. “The truth is, it hurts. It hurts so much that if I let even a little of it out, in the middle of a nice day, with my best friend, in a city full of overpriced nonsense – I think the whole thing comes out, all of it, and I don’t get to put it back. And I don’t want to today, Ember. I don’t want to hurt today. I’ve been hurting for months. I just want one day where I get to be a person who isn’t sad about her husband. One day where I’m just a woman spending a crazy amount of someone else’s money and watching her friend have the best romance in history.” She turns to me, and her eyes are bright and wet and pleading and trying so hard. “So can you let me have it? Just – can we stay in the fantasy a little longer? Please?”

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