TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 458

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CHAPTER 381: YOU STUPID GIRL

EMBER’S POV

“You stupid girl,” she hisses. “You stupid, reckless, selfish girl. You never think. You have never once in your life stopped to think before you fling yourself headlong into a thing-do you know whose house this is? Do you have any idea what these people do to those who lie their way onto their floors?” Her hands come up to her mouth, and she’s not even fully talking to me now, she’s talking to the room, to herself. “She’s buried herself. She’s walked in here and buried herself alive, and she’s dragged me down into the hole right beside her, of course she has, because that is what she does that has always been what she-”

“Mother, stop.” I’m on my feet now, hands out, gentling, pleading. “You’re spiralling. Nothing has to happen here. Nobody has to know anything. I am begging you – sit down, take a breath, and just talk to me. We only want to talk-”

“We?”

And her eyes snap past my shoulder.

To the masked, silent bodyguard standing behind me. To the wall of black she’s been too panicked to properly look at.

Her gaze fixes on him, narrows, and I watch her cleverly cornered mind begin, slowly, to turn.

And that’s when Knox speaks,

“Sit down,” he says quietly. “And listen to her. She came a very long way to ask you a handful of questions, and she has asked you politely, twice. The least you owe her is to sit, and hear them, and answer.” A beat, and his voice drops lower, colder. “You owe her a great deal more than that. But we can start there.”

Devika goes rigid.

She stares at the bodyguard who just gave the mistress of the floor an order – in a voice no bodyguard on this earth has any right to own, a voice that fills the room and presses down on

And I watch it happen behind her eyes.

I watch the panic drain out of her face, and something else pour in to replace it, something slow and cold and awful, something I have seen on that face my entire life.

Calculation.

CHAPTER 381: YOU STUPID GIRL

Her eyes move from Knox to me to Knox again.

And a smile begins to spread across my mother’s face- slow, and cold, and delighted, the smile of a woman who has just realised that fate has walked something extraordinarily valuable straight through her door.

“Oh,” Devika says softly. “Oh.”

“Mother-

“You have no idea what you’ve just handed me, do you?” She’s laughing now, low and unhinged and gleeful, backing toward the door, one manicured hand pressed to her chest. ” You want to know what I owe you, sweetheart? You marched in here to talk to me about what I owe?” Her eyes glitter, wet and vicious and triumphant. “I owe you nothing. Not one thing. You have been the single greatest mistake of my life since the day you drew breath, and I have spent your whole existence paying for it, and I am done paying.” She’s at the door now, hand finding the handle. “But I’ll tell you what I do owe. I owe a great deal – to a very dangerous man who owns everything you can see and a great many things you can’t – and I have been searching for a way to clear that debt for months.” The smile splits wider, radiant, monstrous. “And you, my darling, reckless, stupid girl, you’ve just delivered it. Gift-wrapped. Both of you.”

“Mother, don’t-”

But she’s already wrenching the door open, already turning her head to scream it down the length of the floor, already glowing with a triumph so pure and so poisonous it stops my heart in my chest-

“GUARDS!” Devika shrieks, and her voice carries like a struck bell, ringing out over the music and the laughter and the whole beautiful rotting floor. “IMPOSTORS! Impostors on my floor!” Her finger stabs toward me, toward Knox, her face rich with malice. “This woman is a liar – a false name, a false face, she’s not who she says she is!” And then, savouring it, drawing it out, delivering the killing blow with the pure vicious joy: “And that man beside her is no bodyguard. Pull off the mask and see for yourselves. That is KNOX VOLKOV. The LYCAN KING is standing on your floor!”

And the whole world detonates.

Because the name lands like a lit match dropped into gunpowder.

The Lycan King, here, in the one place on earth that hates his kind above all others, and I feel the entire mountain change in a single heartbeat.

The music dies. The laughter chokes off. The honeyed air goes cold and murderous, and everywhere, all at once, heads turn toward us with the specific, hungry attention of people

CHAPTER 381: YOU STUPID GIRL

who have spent their whole lives being told the King is the enemy, and who have just been handed him alive and cornered.

Devika stands framed in the doorway. My mother. Glowing with triumph. Having sold her own daughter and the King of the wolves to a den of alpha-hating rogues to clear a debt she owed to a rogue lord.

And beside me, slow and not the least hurried, the bodyguard reaches up and pulls the mask down off his face.

And Knox Volkov lets every last one of them see exactly who he is.

The gold floods up into his eyes, and Phantom rises snarling under his skin, and the temperature in the room drops another ten degrees as the dominance rolls off him in a wave.

And I watch the nearest rogues actually flinch, watch some animal part of them recoil from a power they’ve been taught to hate but have never once stood in the path of.

But there are so many of them. So, so many, closing in from every side, enforcers shouldering through the crowd, hands going to weapons, the exits filling with muscle, and the beautiful gold light of the Slaughterhouse beginning to pulse a slow and terrible red.

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