TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 448

CHAPTER 371: HIS ACT OF MERCY

KNOX’S POV

“Thank you.” He’s staring straight ahead, and his voice is steady, and there’s something in it I’ve never heard from him before-something almost peaceful. “For the mercy of it.”

“Mercy.” The word comes out flat and disbelieving. “I’m putting you in a cell for the rest of your natural life, Nathaniel. That is not mercy.”

“It is, though.” He turns to face me. “Knox. If I had done what I did to any other man alive-drugged him, engineered the deaths of sixty-three of his people, his mate included, looked him in the eye and lied to him for a decade-I would already be dead. You’d have killed me with your bare hands, slowly, and there is not a soul on this continent who would have called it anything but justice. That was the earned outcome. That was what I had coming.” His jaw tightens. “Instead you’re giving me a trial. A lawful one. A cell instead of a grave. You’re letting me answer for what I did like a man instead of dying like a dog in a yard- and you’re doing it while every instinct you own is screaming at you to open my throat. That’s not weakness, and it’s not favouritism.” His voice drops. “It’s mercy and justice herd in the same hand at the same time, which is the single hardest thing a king is ever asked to do. Most ment can only manage the one. You found a way to carry both. So. Thank you. For seeing me as a man who has to answer for his sins, and not just a monster to be put down in a corner.”

And something enormous and painful shifts through my chest, because this-this is the Nathaniel I fought side by side with. The one under the robotics.

“You are a monster,” I say, and my voice isn’t level anymore. “Make no mistake, Nathaniel. What you did—I will never forgive it. I’ll do justice for it, but I will not forgive it, not in this life, and I need you to carry that with you into that cell.”

“I know.”

“But.” I have to stop and breathe. “But you are also my brother. And that doesn’t stop being true just because you did a monstrous thing. I found you at a time when I desperately needed a confidante, and I made you my family; and you have been my brother for years, and you’ll be my brother in that cell, and you’ll still be my brother when we’re both old and gone.” My hands tighten on the wheel until the leather creaks. “In another life-one without the secrets. Without the sabotage and the engineering and the sixty-three. Some other life where you’d just told me things. Trusted me. Let me carry the weight of them beside you instead of managing me like one more outcome to be steered-” My voice shakes. “In that life, I think we’re true brothers, Nathaniel. Real ones. And I’m going to spend the rest of mine sorry that we didn’t get to be.”

Nathaniel is quiet.

And then, because the two of us are men who have never once in our lives known how to hold a moment like this without dropping it, he says, “That was almost a genuine feeling, Knox. From you. Out loud. I’m noting the date and time.”

And I laugh-a rough, wet, unwilling thing that tears its way out of me-and the coal in my chest eases, just slightly, and for one moment the two bastards from the old days are back in the car, driving into the city on a ridiculous errand, and it’s almost, almost like it was before I knew what he’d done.

“Speaking of feelings,” I say, when I’ve got my voice back under me. “You need to fix things with Queenie.”

1/2

AV

Nathan groans and drops his head back against the seat.

“Ember’s already lectured mne at length. I brought her water. It did not go well.”

I shake my head slowly.

“You absolute disaster of a man. A glass of water. You defuse crises that would flatten lesser men and you tried to win back a decade of marriage with hydration” But I sober. “Here’s your trouble, Nathaniel Ember’s telling you to win her back, and she’s right that you have to try. But she’s coming at it from the wrong end, because she’s a romantic and you are going to a cell.”

He frowns. “Then what’s the point? If I’m going to prisori, why-”

“Because you’re not winning her back.” I glance at him at the light. “You’re not getting her back, Nathaniel. You’re going away, and she should go and live her whole life, and you both already know it. That’s not what you’re fighting for, and if you go in there fighting for that, she’ll smell the lie on you in a heartbeat.” I hold his eyes. “You’re fighting for her forgiveness. That’s a different thing entirely. That woman, stood by you through everything-through the massacre, through the cover-up, through finding out exactly what you are -she stood there and she loved you and she did not give up on you until you gave her no other choice in the world. And she deserves to hear, from your own mouth, without a strategy and without a single angle, that you know it. That you see what she gave you and what you did with it. That you’re sorry-fully, all the way down-for having wasted it.”

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