TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 466

CHAPTER 399 GAMBLING FOR TWO

CHAPTER 389: GAMBLING FOR TWO

EMBER’S POV

He crosses to his sister, slow and enormous, and he leans down until his scarred face is inches from hers, and when he speaks it’s soft, and it’s the most frightening thing I’ve heard all night.

“You’ll tell her.” His dark eyes bore into her. “You’ll tell her every last thing she wants to know. Because if you don’t, sister-if you sit there and spite a girl who’s done nothing but be born to you – then you and I are finished, do you understand me? Finished for good.” His voice drops lower. “I will strip your silks. I will empty your rooms. I will put you out of this mountain with the clothes on your back and nothing else, and I will tell every rogue on this continent that Devika Black is dead to the Black line, and you will spend the rest of your miserable grasping life with no name, no house, no floor, and no family – completely, utterly alone. Which is, I think, the one thing in this world you’ve always been most afraid of.” He straightens. “So. Do you tell her willingly? Or do I throw you out into the cold and let you find out what it’s like to finally have nowhere left to run?”

And I watch my mother’s face, and I watch the fear win – the fear of a woman who has spent her whole life clawing for a place to belong and just heard the last door in the world start to close.

“You wouldn’t,” she whispers.

“Try me,” Silas says.

For a long, long moment, Devika says nothing.

Then her shoulders drop, just slightly, and her chin comés down, and something breaks in her that isn’t quite surrender but is close enough.

“…Fine,” she grinds out. “Fine. But not for free. Not for her.” A last, hateful glare at me. “If I have to open my mouth, then I open it the only way anything gets opened in this house. By the rules. She wants my secrets? Then she pays for them, same as anyone.”

And Silas straightens, and something grim settles over his scarred face, and he nods slowly, because his spiteful sister has just backed herself into the one corner he can work with.

“So be it,” he says. “If you won’t give it freely, we do it the old way. The house’s way.” He turns from her and claps his hands once, and the sound splits across the room. “Clear it. Bring the table.”

The rogues scramble. They haul away the broken furniture and the bleeding men, and from a curtained alcove they carry out a low table of solid black wood, and on it they set an archaic silver instrument.

A scale, older than the mountain, its two pans hanging empty and waiting.

“Here’s how it works, niece.” Silas turns to me, his voice dropping into command. “In my house, we settle conflict exactly one way. We don’t scream. We gamble. This is the Slaughterhouse, and the house deals in one currency only. Truth. You want something a person won’t give you freely, you sit, and you wager for it”

He gestures at the silver scale.

“But understand the stakes before you take that chair. The house doesn’t deal in money, and it doesn’t deal in mercy. Every question has a price. To ask one, you wager a memory of your own. To refuse to

<CHAPTER 38 GAMBLING FOR TWO

answer, you wager one too.” His dark eyes hold mine, grave. “Win the round, and you take the truth you came for. Lose it, and the house reaches into your skull and takes the memory you staked, and it’s gone. You walk out with a hole where something used to be, and you never even know what you lost.”

The room drops into suffocating silence.

I stare at the scale, and a cold, dropping horror settles into my stomach. To get the truth of who I am, I have to pay for it. Piece by piece. Memory by memory.

Every answer I drag out of my mother is going to cost me something I can never get back.

“And her?” I nod at Devika. “She plays too?”

“Everyone at the table plays,” Silas says. “She wagers her secrets against her own memories, same as you. She can refuse to answer your questions, but doing so costs her a memory, too, and my sister has always been very attached to her own mind. We’ll find out how many pieces of it she’s willing to burn to keep her spite.”

Devika pales, gripping the arms of her chair as they steer her to the table.

“Silas-”

“Sit down, Devika.”

She snaps her mouth shut.

Silas looks at Knox. “You’ll play too, King, if you’re set on staying at her side. And you, little niece. Two of you against her secrets. The house watches. The house reads every lie. Nobody leaves until the game is done.”

Knox steps close at my back, his chest against my shoulders, his voice a rough whisper for me alone.

“Ember. You don’t have to do this. We can find another way to break her.”

“There’s no other way.” I look across the black table at the woman who has hidden who I am my whole life. Rayana is dying hours south, and the answers might as well be sitting right here in front of me. “She’s the only one who knows. I’ve waited my whole life. I’ll pay whatever it costs.”

His jaw sets. “Then I pay it with you. Whatever you wager, I wager beside you. We do this together.”

I pull out the chair across from my mother and sit. Knox takes the seat beside me and covers my hand on the tabletop with his bruised one.

Silas lowers his massive frame into the third chair, presiding over the table like a judge.

The silver scale sits between us all, empty and waiting and patient as the grave.

“Good,” Silas says, and there’s something terribly sad in it now. “Let’s find out what my sister buried: Ask your first question, niece. And choose a memory you can bear to lose, because you will lose some of them tonight.”

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