TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 442

< CHAPTER 365 SOMETHING BIGGER

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CHAPTER 365: SOMETHING BIGGER

KNOX’S POV

I go still. I already have the gist of it-she called me earlier this night, and she gave me the facts.

straight: my housekeeper had been moving sedated women through the servant tunnels in a hood,

One of them had a fresh knife wound. Marjorie had drawn a blade on Reyes and called my fiancée

a witch.

I stood in the cold outdoors with the phone pressed to my ear and felt the floor tilt under me.

I told Ember to do what she felt was right, and I meant it-and then I did not come home for four more hours, because I could not make myself face what waited here

“She’s in the holding cells,” Ember says. “I kept her solitary. Where you-where I put her.” Her hand fists slightly in the sheet over my chest. “I keep thinking I should feel something clean about it. Vindicated, maybe. She pulled a knife, Knox. On Reyes. There was blood on those girls, actual blood, and she called me a witch and started screaming about the moon bleeding, and I did the right thing. I know I did the right thing.” Her voice drops. “So why does it sit in my stomach like I did something monstrous?”

“Because the whole thing is monstrous.” I cover her fisted hand with mine, uncurl it, thread my fingers through. “Not you. The situation. That’s not the same as you being wrong. You protected this house. There’s nothing in that to be ashamed of.”

She’s quiet.

Then, carefully, watching me: “Have you talked to her?”

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

And this is the part I’m not proud of. The part where the man who has stared down people who wanted him dead tells the truth to the one person he doesn’t lie to.

“Not yet.”

“Knox-”

“I know exactly how that sounds.” I look up at the canopy because it’s easier than her face. “I run a continent. I’ve sat across a table from men who tried to have me killed, and I didn’t so much as blink. And I cannot make myself walk down one flight of stairs and open a cell door, because-” My jaw works. “Because right now, in my head, there’s still a version of this where there’s an

CHAPTER 365: SOMETHING BIGGER

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explanation. Where Marjorie is Marjorie. The woman who fed me when I was a proud starving boy visiting from Zürich and too stubborn to say I was hungry. The woman who kept this house standing on its feet for the years I couldn’t stand to be inside it.” I breathe. “And the second I open that door, that version dies. Either she explains it, and I’ve lost her to whatever madness this is, or she can’t, and I’ve lost her to the truth that I was a fool to trust her for years. And I’ve-” I have to stop. “I’ve had a lot of people turn out to be something other than what I believed this year, Ember. Celeste. Nathaniel. Half the council. Rafael, whom I can’t even confirm is in the ground. I just need one day. One day where I don’t know for certain. Where she gets to still be Marjorie in the not-knowing.” I finally look at her. “Tell me that’s cowardice and I’ll get up and go down there right

now.”

She’s quiet for a long moment, those clever eyes moving over my face.

Then she shifts up onto her elbow and puts her hand flat over my heart-the same place she laid it last night, when she told me I could put things down with her-and she doesn’t tell me to be stronger, and she doesn’t tell me it’s fine.

“It’s not cowardice,” she says softly. “It’s grief you haven’t agreed to have yet. That’s allowed. Take the day.” Her thumb moves over my sternum. “But Knox. It’s going to have to be faced. You know

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