TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 419

CHAPTER 344 BLEEDING WRONG

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CHAPTER 344: BLEEDING WRONG

EMBER’S POV

Because she said it out loud.

The exact thing sitting on my chest like a stone – Rayana upstairs, drowning by the hour-a said it smugly, dangled it like a worm on a hook over a woman she’s just put on the floor four and every ounce of grief and terror and fury I’ve been swallowing since I watched Rayana sm goodbye comes roaring straight up my spine-

“Never,” I snarl, and I come up off that mat with everything I have.

And I put it all into one clean brutal uppercut, exactly where Knox showed me the soft place u the jaw – and it lands. It actually lands.

Hale’s head snaps back, and she staggers, a real stagger, and for one bright vicious second I f

incredible.

“Ember.” Knox is off the wall. “That’s enough. Both of you-”

But we’re locked.

We are completely, totally locked. Hale rights herself and touches her jaw with two fingers and laughs, delighted, genuinely delighted, and comes at me – and I meet her. And we go.

Her all draft and misdirection and years of dirty tricks, me all fury and grief and the fistful of thin I’ve learned in less than a week – and I get a few more on her, I do, I make her work for it now.

And every time she puts me down, I drag myself up and set my feet and spit “again” and every time Knox says “that’s enough”, I ignore him completely, because I would rather bleed out on this floor than let this smiling, disdainful thing beat me and know it beat me.

And I can feel him getting genuinely afraid now, hovering at the mat’s edge like a man watching a fire jump its pit

And then Hale ends it

I don’t see this one either

I come in, and there’s a blur and a sharp impossible pain low in my side, some strike I have no name for and no defence against, and my whole body just

folds

My legs quit

I hit the mat, and I cannot get up. I try, and I cannot Everything below my ribs has gone to water

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and white fire, and a groan tears out of me, low and involuntary, curled on the matting, my bod flatly refusing to answer a single command I give it.

“Ember!” And Knox is there, instantly, on his knees, his hands on me, the fear stripped naked ac his face, the coach gone and the King gone and just the terrified man left in their place. “Where hold still – what did she do, where does it-”

And over his shoulder, I can see Hale standing back.

She’s smug. That cold, pleased little smile, victorious.

But I’m looking right at her, from down here on the floor, up under Knox’s arm –

and I see it.

I see her lift one hand quickly to her face and wipe at the corner of her eye, and her fingers com away, and there’s something dark on them. Dark and wet.

And for one second, one impossible second, I would swear on my own life, that she is bleeding

from her eyes.

And there’s something else. Something I can’t quite hold onto.

She’s still smug, still standing there victorious over the ruin of me – but there’s something wrong with her now, in the low grey winter light, something that was not there when we started.

She looks – older. Aged.

Like the fight pulled something out of her, like the woman standing over me is a handful of years further down the road than the one who stepped onto this mat twenty minutes ago, and I cannot make it make sense, I cannot make my eyes agree with what they’re telling me-

I open my mouth to ask.

But she’s already moving.

She wipes her fingers clean down her dark skirt, quick and neat, and she inclines her head to me, courteous, still smiling, and she says it – the thing that’s going to sit lodged in me for weeks, cold and unexplained, the thing I won’t understand until it is far, far too late to matter

“You fight,” Hale says softly. “like someone who has never once had to survive being weaker than her enemy” Her smile deepens ‘Do learn how, dove Before the day comes that it’s the only thing in the world that matters” And, sweet as anything “The pleasure was mine. Truly, truly mine

And then she’s gone Out the door, quick and light on her feet as a girl half her age, before I can force out a single word, before I can ask about her eyes or her face or any of it

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