TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 399

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EMBE

“Ember Aragon,” she breathes, through her fingers. “You you deliciously evil woman.”

“Too much?”

“Too much? It’s perfect. It’s diabolical. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. He will never recover. He will never prank you again as long as he lives.” She grabs my shoulders. “You have to. You absolutely, one hundred percent, no-backing-out, have to do that. I will personally die if you don’t.”

“Then we need a few things.”,

“We need several things.” She’s already scanning the shelves with new, focused, terrible purpose. “We need the–” she points “-and the-” she points again “–and, oh, yes, obviously the-” and she sweeps toward a display I’ll let the reader imagine, “-and most importantly,” she turns to me, deadly serious, “we need handcuffs. Good ones. Heavy ones. The kind that mean business. This does not work without the handcuffs.”

“This does not work without the handcuffs,” I agree gravely.

We buy the handcuffs.

I’m not going to tell you what else we buy, or what the plan is, because it’s between me and Queenie and the long-suffering shop assistant who rings it all up without changing expression once, a true professional, a credit to her field.

But I’ll tell you that when we leave, Queenie is carrying a discreet black bag like it contains the crown jewels, and she keeps looking at me and dissolving into giggles.

And I keep looking at the bag and thinking about Knox’s face, the unflappable wall of him, and feeling a

warm, vicious, anticipatory glee that I have not felt in – possibly ever.

Revenge, it turns out, is an excellent mood.

“He’s going to lose his mind,” Queenie says happily, as we rejoin the traumatise guards on the street

“That’s the idea.”

“No, I mean it, this is going to genuinely break him, in the best way, this is-” She stops and tilts her head at me, suddenly fond. “You know, a month ago, I don’t think you’d have done this. The Ember I met would’ve apologised for the prarik that was played on her.”

And she’s right, and it lands somewhere warm, because it’s true

The woman who married Gale would never.

The woman who got carried over a threshold nights ago, who held a poisoned cup steady this morning and read two liars and won – she absolutely would.

CHA

TRANCED ON THE STREET

She has a black bag full of revenge and a best friend cackling beside her, and she is, for this one bright stolen afternoon, happy.

Which is, of course, exactly when I see him.

We’ve drifted toward the bridal district without quite deciding to, Queenie steering us there with the casual determination of a woman who has plans, and we’ve stopped in front of a boutique window full of impossible white dresses.

Queenie is mid-rhapsody about getting me into one “just for fun, just to torture Knox with a photo, just so I can cry” – and I’m laughing, I’m actually laughing, looking at the dresses and letting myself imagine, just for a second, the impossible future where I get to wear one-

And in the reflection in the glass, across the street, in the crowd, ! see a profile.

The exact line of a jaw. The set of a pair of shoulders.

A particular way of standing, weight back on the heels, unhurried, like the street belongs to him and he’s letting everyone else borrow it.

Rafael.

Everything in me goes to ice.

My laugh dies in my throat.

I turn – slow, the way you turn when you’re afraid that turning fast will make the thing real – and I look across the street, and he’s there, half-hidden by the crowd, moving away from me down the pavement, and my whole body has gone cold and electric and certain.

It’s him. It’s him.

I grab Reyes’s sleeve and I say, fast and low, “The man in the grey coat, across the street, moving left, do not lose him, follow at a distance, do not let him see you coming, go-” and Reyes is moving before ! finish, Daxon peeling the other way to flank.

And I go too fast, but not running, threading through the crowd with my heart slamming, keeping the grey

coat in sight.

“Ember?” Queenie’s voice, behind me, alarmed. “Ember, what-

I don’t answer. I can’t. I’m focused on the grey coat, the shoulders, the back of a head I’d know anywhere, weaving through the crowd.

And I get closer, and closer, and the guards are closing from the sides, and the man slows at a corner, and I reach out and catch his shoulder and pull, and he turns-

And it’s not him.

It’s not him at all.

THE STREET

Paints

49 a stanyer.

A mari, maybe fifty, soft-faced, startled, nothing like Rafael, nothing like him at all, once I’m looking at the front of him instead of the back – wrong eyes, wrong mouth, a face that has never once in its life been

beautiful or cruel.

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