TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 447

CHAPTER SHIT 25

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CHAPTER 370: HER GRANDMOTHER

KNOX’S POV

Nathaniel’s already got the tablet out when I slide in, thumbs moving, that constant restless motion of a man whose mind outruns his body.

“There’sa Hale thing,” I say, once we’re through the gates. “I need your read on it, and I need you to tell me it’s nothing.”

He doesn’t look up. “Can’t promise that until I hear it. Go.”

“Ember says that when they sparred, Hale did something that stopped her wolf. Reached inside her and shut Sapphire off, mid-channel. Switched her off like a tap.” I watch the road unspool. “And there was blood from Hale’s eyes afterward. And Ember says she looked older after. Aged, in the space of the fight.” I make myself say the rest. “So tell me my cousin has a party trick, Nathaniel. Tell me it’s nothing.”

Nathaniel doesn’t answer right away, and when I glance over, the tablet is face-down on his knee and his expression has gone genuinely still.

“I can’t tell you that,” he says slowly.

“Nathaniel-”

“Because I’ve read about it.” He turns to look at me. “Once. In the old war records. The Long War-the eastern campaigns, the ones the council files under myth because the truth of them is too ugly for the archives.” His voice drops. “The reason the East was so brutal, Knox. The reason that war dragged on for generations and ended entire civilisations. It wasn’t only that they were stronger, though they were. It’s that eastern fighters could do things our wolves simply cannot. They moved-the records say it plainly- like demons. They knew arts we’ve lost or never had. And the worst of them, the ones the accounts are genuinely frightened of even centuries later, could reach into an enemy alpha and stop him shifting. Hold his wolf pinned down inside him so he couldn’t call it, and open him up while he was trapped in a man’s soft body.” He holds my eyes. “It’s why so many alphas died in that war. They went in braced to shift and tear apart, and they couldn’t, because something had reached inside them and turned the wolf off.”

The exact phrase Ember used. Word for word.

The car is very quiet.

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“How,” I say, and my voice has gone rough, “does Hale know how to do that. She’s not eastern, Nathaniel. She’s a Volkov. She’s my blood.”

And Nathaniel-damn him, and bless him-has an answer, and it’s so reasonable, so plausible, that I reach out and take it and I do not look under, because I do not have room today for what’s under it.

“Her grandmother,” he says. “The old woman. She travelled from out east, didn’t she? Kept the old ways, the old crafts, the histories-half your family thought she’d lost her mind, but everyone agrees she knew things. And Hale was close to her. Practically raised at the woman’s knee, from what I understand.” He shrugs, one shoulder. “If there is one person in our pack who might carry a fragment of the old eastern arts, Knox, it would be a girl who spent her whole childhood being taught by an eastern woman who kept the old ways alive out of sheer stubbornness. It’s a technique. A dangerous one, an ugly one, dredged up from a bad war-but just a technique, taught grandmother to granddaughter. That’s all it needs to be.”

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CHAP

BANDLUSTUER

That’s all. Phantom repeats, and ever he doesn’t sound like he believes it.

“But I take it.

+25 Points

Goddess forgive me, Ltake it, and I set it down, because the alternative is a question I do not have the room to hold today-not on top of Marjorie in a cell, and Rafael maybe-breathing somewhere, and my cousin crying at a window..

A man can only carry so much before his arms give out.

“Right,” I say. “Her grandmother. That tracks.”

Nathaniel watches me a moment longer, and I know he knows I’m choosing not to dig, and I know he’s letting me.

We drive in silence for a while, the city coming up grey on the horizon.

And then, because it’s been sitting in my chest since I made the arrangements, I say the offer thing. The one I came out here to say.

“I’ve set it up. The facility. For after the casino and gala.” I keep my eyes on the road. “You’re going to be taken into custody, Nathaniel. For the massacre. The cover-up. All of it. You’ll face judgment-properly, lawfully. I won’t stop it.”

I brace for the argument. For the machine to fire, for the angles and the case for why he’s too useful to lose, for the engineering.

It doesn’t come.

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