TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 443

CHAPTER 366: SHE’S LEAVING

CHAPTER 366: SHE’S LEAVING

KNOX’S POV

She’s right, Phantom says, low and certain, fully awake now. She’s been right since the first night. The house is wrong.

“Ember-”

“And the wolf.” She turns to me, and now there’s something almost desperate threading through it. “In the fight. With Hale. I know you decided it was a concussion. I know that’s the sensible answer, and Goddess, you love a sensible answer; you’d file the apocalypse under ‘weather’ if you could.”A humourless breath. “But I know what I felt, Knox. I reached for Sapphire-on purpose, controlled, exactly the way you taught me. And she came. I felt the silver start in my hands. And then Hale did something, and it didn’t falter, it didn’t fumble, it stopped. Like a door slamming shut inside me. Sapphire was there, and then she was gone, and I could not reach her, and that’s when Hale put me on the floor.” Her voice cracks at the edges. “And then the blood from her eyes. And the way she looked older after. Aged. Like the fight peeled years off her right in front of me. That isn’t a concussion. A concussion doesn’t do that to her. That was real, it happened, and every single time I try to hand it to you, it slides right off you like water off glass, and I feel-” She stops, fighting to keep her voice level, and losing. “I feel like there’s an enormous thing sitting directly in front of me. and I’ve gone blind to it. Like there’s this huge chunk of the picture torn away, and I’m terrified, Knox, because I don’t understand what my own eyes keep showing me, and I need one person in this house to tell me I’m not going mad.”

And I look at her-my clever, sharp-tongued, frightened woman, sitting up in the dark and insisting on the truth of what she saw against a man who kept gently telling her she’d seen wrong-and I make a decision I should have made days ago.

“You’re not going mad,” I say quietly.

She goes very still.

“…What?”

CHAPTER 366 SHE’S LEAVING

+25 Points

down under all of them.” My voice roughens. “So, no. You’re not missing a chunk because you’re

broken. You’re missing it because something is genuinely being kept from you. From both of us.

Under my own roof. And I’ve been too much of a coward to say it out loud, because the moment i say it, I have to act, and acting means facing things I would give a great deal not to face.”

I watch it move across her face-the relief that she isn’t mad, and then, right behind it, the fear.

Because if she’s not mad, then all of it is real.

“So what do we do?” she says.

“I do something.” I pull her back down against me because I need her solid and warm under my arm for the next part. “Tomorrow. About Hale.”

She tenses instantly. “Hale.”

“She’s leaving. The house. I’ve decided.” I feel her go rigid against my side, and I keep going before she can build up speed. “Whatever she is-whatever that was in the fight, whatever the truth is about Celeste’s room and the trance and the blood from her eyes-I don’t have the full shape of it, and maybe I never will. But I know one thing for certain, and it’s the only thing I need to know. You’re afraid of her. Genuinely afraid. Afraid, in the specific way you get when your gut is right and everyone’s telling you it isn’t. And your gut is the only compass I trust in this house anymore. So

she goes.”

“Knox, you can’t throw your own cousin out because I-”

“I’m not throwing her out because of you.” I press my mouth into her hair. “I’m doing it because my house has felt wrong under my feet since the day I crossed the threshold. Because my fiancée is frightened, and my own instincts have been speaking to me for days, and I have spent every one of those days making excuses for the woman who sits at the centre of all of it-because she’s blood, and because I’m a coward who didn’t want to look.” I feel her draw breath to argue, and I tighten my arm around her. “That ends tomorrow. But not tonight. Tonight you’re going to let me hold you, and we are not going to say another word about Hale or Marjorie or bleeding moons or any of it. Tonight I came home to you, and I got the clean version of you, and I intend to keep it until the sun comes up. The rot can wait for morning.”

She’s quiet for a moment. Then, muffled against my chest: “You came home to me.”

“I always come home to you.” It’s the truest thing I own. “That’s the entire point of the day, Ember. Getting through it so I can come home to you. Everything else is just the part I survive to get here.” She makes a small sound, and her arm tightens hard around my ribs, and her cold feet find my shins one more time, gentler now, almost tender, and I hold her in the dark and let the rotting world wait outside the door for a few more hours.

CHAPTER 366 SHE’S LEAVING

But I don’t sleep.

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