TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 400

CHAPTER 326: ROSA DE ESCARCHA

EMBER’S POV

The man follows my gaze to the flower, baffled, then sees Daxon and Reyes, who have arrived and are looming with the unmistakable energy of men deciding whether to break someone, and he goes pale and

starts to babble.

I

“I – please – I didn’t – a man gave it to me, I swear, I didn’t take anything, a man in traffic, back there, he just – he handed it to me through the car window, said it was too pretty to throw away, I thought it was odd but it was pretty, so I kept it, I haven’t done anything, please-”

“What man?” I’m closer now, and the guards have him hemmed, and he’s whimpering. “Describe him. The man who gave it to you.”

“I-I don’t – it was quick, I was in traffic, he was just there and then gone-”

“Was he-” My mouth is dry.

I describe Rafael. Tall, beautiful, the kind of handsome that makes a room rearrange itself, the easy charm the way he holds himself like he’s doing the world a favour by existing.

I describe him in detail, every detail, my voice shaking.

And the man shakes his head, bewildered.

“No,” he says. “No, nothing – he wasn’t – that’s not the man who gave it to me wasn’t handsome, miss. Quite the opposite. He was-” the man gropes for the word, and lands on it with an apologetic wince, “-he was hideous. Honestly. Burned, or scarred badly, all down one side of his face, I couldn’t stop looking. I felt terrible about it. Not a handsome man at all. I’m sorry, I don’t – is that helpful? I don’t know what’s happening.”

And my heart drops straight through the bottom of me.

Because a winter rose is not a coincidence.

A winter rose handed to a stranger to carry through these exact streets, on this exact afternoon, the one afternoon I’ve left the estate – that is not chance.

That is a message.

Rosa de escarcha, he had called it

He said they only bloomed in the cold. That people think they’re fragile because they look delicate, but they survive things that would kill ordinary flowers

My heart pounds straight up into my ears

He had said all of that in reference to me, once, pressing the bloom into my hand like a promise I didn’t

want.

808A DE ESCARCHA

But standing here now, staring at the same impossible flower in a stranger’s grip, I can’t help wondering if this time the message isn’t about me at all.

If this time, he’s telling me something far more explicit. That the devil survived the very hell he was meant

to burn in.

That the thing which should have kitted him simply, quietly, did not.

My head spins in a hundred different directions.

The rose says Rafael, screams Rafael, and could not possibly be anyone but Rafael.

And the face says a hideous, scarred, burned stranger.

Ten surgeons, I think, distantly.

Ten surgeons in the middle of the night to save a man Knox put his claws through. You don’t come back from that whole. You don’t come back beautiful.

Or it’s someone working for him.

Or it’s nothing, it’s a coincidence, it’s a delusion, it’s what happens to a woman who’s spent every day bracing for the catastrophe until she starts seeing ghosts in strangers’ faces.

I don’t know. That’s the horror of it.

I genuinely cannot tell, standing in the street with my heart in my throat, whether I have just brushed against my dead enemy’s reach or my own unravelling mind.

And I can see, even now, that the not-knowing is the point. That this is designed to be unknowable. Which is itself the most Rafael thing of all.

“Miss?” The man is shaking. “Please. Can I go? I really don’t-”

The guards look at me. They want to take him in. I can see it in both of them, the readiness, the we’ll make him talk Daxon’s hand has already closed on the man’s arm

“Let him go,” I say.

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