TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 449

CHAPTER 372: THE MOST BEAUTIFUL

KNOX’S POV

Nathaniel is staring at me.

“The gala,” I say. “That’s your chance. Not to win her. Not to fix it. To stand up in front of the woman who never once gave up on you and let her see that you know exactly what she was worth-before you’re gone. Give her one thing that’s true. One thing with no engineering under it. And then let her forgive you, or let her not-but let her choose it, with the whole truth laid out in front of her.” I glance over. “Can you do that? One real thing. In front of everyone.”

“…I don’t know,” Nathaniel says, and it’s quiet, and it’s the most honest thing he’s said in the car. “I’ve never done a real thing in front of everyone in my life. I don’t know if I know how.”

“Then it’ll mean more when you do it,” I say. “Because she’ll know exactly what it cost you to try.”

He’s silent the rest of the way into the city, staring out the window at the grey buildings coming up, arid ! let him be, because I’ve planted it-and Nathaniel, whatever else he is, has never once in his years failed to execute on a plan after he’s decided that it matters.

Queenie has been at Ember for five hours.

I know because I’ve been counting.

Five hours behind a closed door with a small army of people she brought in for the occasion-stylists, à woman with a case of cosmetics the size of a footlocker, someone whose entire job appears to be the hair-and every time I’ve tried the handle, I’ve been turned away by Queenie’s voice through the wood, gleeful and tyrannical: not yet, she’s not ready, go put your suit on and stop hovering, you’re steaming up the door.

So I’ve put the suit on.

The bodyguard’s black, cut close, no crown, no crest, nothing that says King.

I’ve stood in the front hall and I’ve checked the cars and I’ve checked them again, and I’ve told myself the tightness in my chest is about the plan, the rogues, the room where nobody can lie, and not about the fact that I haven’t seen my own fiancée in five hours.

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Then the door at the top of the stairs opens, and Queenie’s voice rings out over the hall-“Ladies and gentlemen and my king, I present to you: Merrilyn Aster”-and Ember steps out onto the landing.

And every thought in my head goes out like a snuffed candle.

Because it isn’t Ember.

That’s the first, disorienting beat of it-that the woman at the top of my stairs is a stranger.

They’ve darkened her hair, the warm auburn deepened to something near-black that drinks the light and makes her skin look like poured cream.

And it’s swept up off her neck in a way that leaves the whole long line of her throat bare.

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The dress is the deep bruised red of the inside of something, and it’s cut to ruin a man, clinging where it Showild cliny and falling away where it shouldn’t be allowed to.

And there’s a cold hard glitter at her ears and her throat that Queenie has clearly spent a great deal of my

money on.

And her face-they’ve done something to her face that turns the sharp clever features I know into something imperious and untouchable, a woman who has never in her life been told no and would laugh in the face of the man who tried.

And then she starts down the stairs, one hand trailing the banister, chin up, moving like the whole house belongs to her and always has.

And she finds my eyes, and the cruel little Merrilyn smile tugs at her painted mouth, and it is Ember after all, my Ember, wearing a stranger like a second skin, and I forget how to breathe entirely.

I don’t try to hide it.

That’s the thing.

A wiser man, a man with any sense of self-preservation, would school his face, would remember the room is full of staff and his best friend’s wife and there are appearances to keep.

I do none of that.

I stand at the bottom of my own staircase and I let my jaw come loose and I let her see, all of it, every ounce of what the sight of her is doing to me, because I have never wanted anything in my life the way i want the woman coming down these stairs.

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