TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 409

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< CHAPTER 334 GOLD AFTER THE WARMTH

And I could hold it a little longer.

could keep the day whole for one more hour, keep us here in the warm gold hush with the laughter still

ringing in the corners of the room, and hot let the cold thing in.

But he’d know. He always knows.

So I tell him.

I tell him all of it, my cheek against his chest, his heart beating slow and steady under my ear.

The profile in the crowd that stopped me dead mid-laugh.

Sending the guards to follow at a distance instead of tearing off after him myself, because I am not the woman who walked into that lodge in a pretty dress anymore, I’ll never be her again.

Catching a stranger by the shoulder. The winter rose held loose in his hand. What it is. Because Rafael

pressed one exactly like it into my palm once and told me it blooms only in the cold, that it survives the things that kill lesser flowers, and he called me the most beautiful woman he’d ever known.

And the stranger’s face when I described Rafael – the no, the head shake, the man saying the one who gave it to him wasn’t handsome, was the opposite of handsome, was hideous, scarred and burned down

one whole side of his face.

I feel Knox go rigid under me. Every muscle in his body.

“Rosa de escarcha,” I finish quietly, into his chest. “He told me it survives what would kill anything else. And I keep turning it over, and I keep landing in the same place. This time he wasn’t talking about me at all. This time he was telling me the devil walked straight out of the hell he was meant to burn in.”

For a long moment, Knox says nothing.

His hand has gone still on my back. And then he moves, sitting up, and I feel the last of the fiancé leave him, feel the King and the wolf rise up together, cold and lethal and terrifying.

“Where’s the rose?”

“With your forensics people. I had Reyes bag it – taped, no bare hands, for prints. And baxon’s on the man who was carrying it, trailing him quietly. I told him not to lay a finger on him, not even a hard look, just watch him from a distance, because if he’s a tool then he leads somewhere, and taking him in tells whoever’s holding the string that we caught it-”

“Good. Excellent.” His voice has gone rough and low. “That’s – that’s exactly right. That’s exactly what I’d have done.” He’s already shifting toward the edge of the bed, already halfway gone, and I know that movement; I know precisely where it’s taking him.

To the study. To the phones. Back to the war he’s been fighting alone in the dark since the moment I put Rafael might be alive into his hands on a plane.

CHAPTER 334 COME BACK TO BED

CHAPTER 334: COME BACK TO BED

EMBER’S POV

“I need to make calls. If he’s reaching into a public street in daylight, if he’s got people carrying his messages three feet from you, then the perimeter is already compromised. We need to check the street surveillance. Where exactly were you at the time? I want the intersection, the timestamp, everything. Where was your detail? If they were standing more than a foot away from you, I will personally strip them of their rank and throw them in the cells. If he can get a messenger that close, he could have gotten a blade that close. We need to lock down the estate. No one gets in or out. I don’t care if the entire Council is waiting at the gates, I need to-”

“Knox.”

“-get a team watching the stranger too. I need to run his background check and ensure he is truly clean. Fcuk-” He stops and drags a hand hard through his hair. And when he turns back to me, the King cracks for a second, and the man underneath shows through, raw, all the fear he keeps locked under the crown bleeding out into the open.

“I’ve been trying to find them. The ten surgeons. I started digging the moment we landed, and every single thread I pull goes cold in my hands. Because they’re gone, Ember. Every last one. They finished whatever they did, and they scattered off the face of the earth. Almost like someone paid them off to disappear. Within days of me starting to look, they’d relocated clean out of Alaska. They probably have new lives, new names, protected, buried so deep I can’t get within a mile of a single one of them.” His hands close into fists on his thighs. “You don’t hide ten surgeons that thoroughly, that fast, unless someone with a bottomless fortune is making very, very certain that no one alive can ever ask them what they saw on that

table.”

The cold settles into my chest.

“So he lived,” Knox says, low and terrible. “And someone spent a fortune making sure I could never prove it. And now he’s putting flowers into strangers’ hands in broad daylight, mere meters from my fiancée, so

1 that I’ll know it.”

The fear is right there in my chest with the cold, twined together, the thing that’s lived in every quiet moment since the lodge.

But under it, watching him sit on the edge of the bed vibrating with the need to go, to hunt, to vanish into the study and the phones and the endless dark war – something else rises up.

Something fierce and selfish and absolutely certain.

“Come back to bed,” I say.

He blinks at me.

“Ember, I have to-

CHAPTER 344 COME BACK TO PED

you

*25 Points

“know what have to do.” I push myself up and catch his hand, and I pull, gently but with everything behind it. “And you’re going to do it. Tomorrow. You are going to tear this entire world apart looking for him, and I am going to be right there tearing it apart with you, and we are going to find that scarred bastard, and we are going to finish what you started at that lodge.” I pull harder, and he lets me draw him back down, one knee sinking into the mattress. “But not tonight. Tonight, he does not get this. He does not get to reach into the one good day I’ve had in years and take it out of my hands. He has taken enough. He does not get tonight, too.”

“Ember-”

“He’s already in my head.” I get my hands on his shoulders and pull myself up to look at him, and I let him see all of it, every layer – the fear, the fury, the want. “In every quiet moment. Every open door. Every single time I let my guard down for one second, some part of me is already waiting for him to be standing there. He is already living rent-free in every peaceful minute I’ve tried to have since that lodge. I am not – I am not – handing him tonight as well.” My voice drops. “I want one night that’s ours. Just ours. No Rafael. No council. No James building his little plans in the dark. No ghosts. I want to lie in this ridiculous bed with the man I absolutely love, and I want to forget, for a few hours, that anything at all is coming for us. Can you give me that? Please?”

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