TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 475

CHAPTER 398: I GOT PREGNANT

EMBER’S POV

“Fucking brats.” Devika sneers. “Princess Elara and Seravina. The queen’s whole pride. They were trained from the age of five, both of them, bred and drilled for one thing and one thing only.” Her lips curl. “To inherit the Silver Wolf. The Great East’s true power. It is passed on by bloodline. When a host gives birth, it moves, it finds the next worthy one in the line, and the whole Great East holds its breath. Because a Caelora without the silver wolf is a Caelora that can be challenged and torn apart. And the two girls had been raised to be ready for it, to be worthy, to be chosen when it came for them.” She lets out a slow breath. “They were the reason men like Rhovan stayed on their leash. As long as that wolf lived in the ruling line, no one could touch the throne. Not him. Not anyone.”

I can see the pieces turning behind Knox’s grey eyes.

When our gazes finally lock, I know my terror is completely laid bare.

I hate where this is going. I can feel the sickening shape of it forming, a dreadful, monstrous picture twisting like a knife in my gut-and he sees it too.

But he says absolutely nothing, offering only a single, grim nod to anchor me, and I press on.

“So what went wrong?” I ask, my voice hardening. “You had him. You had his ear, his body, and his grand, treasonous dreams. So what reduced the Great Devika from a mastermind in a golden palace to a rat running back to the very mountain she swore she’d outgrown? What broke your pretty little fairytale, Mother?”

Every trace of pleasure drains out of her at once, and what’s left is years of resentment boiling now to a single second.

“I got pregnant.”

The word drops straight into the pit of me.

The anxiety returns, sucking all oxygen in the room. Dread fills me.

“I actually got fucking pregnant with Rhovan’s child. And the moment I knew, I knew I was already a corpse. Because like a house of cards, it all began to crumble.” Her voice trembles, despite the bitter bite in it. “It wasn’t even a grand, melodramatic affair that got us caught. That is what makes it so utterly pathetic. It was a little nobody. A maid. One of Isolde’s personal lapdogs came to fetch Rhovan for her precious Queen and heard us behind a door we actually thought was safe. We were fighting, you see. About the baby. She heard him tell rne to be rid of it, and she heard me refuse. That stupid girl saw my face, she saw his, and by nightfall, the Queen knew everything.”

Her voice trembles, anguished by bitter memories.

“And Rhovan.. my beautiful, faithless snake. The man who whispered ‘we’ in the dark. The man I sacrificed the whole world for. The second there was a child, the second my existence threatened his comfortable little spot at her side, he turned on me as though I’d never meant a single thing to him. He ordered me to end it. He actually asked me to kill OUR child. And when I wept? When I begged him, reminding him of all our treasonous dreams, of every moment he’d ever laid on my lap? He took my face in his hands. He smiled at me, Ember. He smiled and swore he’d fix it. He swore we’d run away together that very night, far

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from Caclora, somewhere Isolde would never find us. And I believed him. I fell hook, line, and sinker because I was a desperate fool who loved him. I packed a bag. I went exactly where he told me to wait. And the bastard handed me straight to her. The whole thing was a trap he tied a neat little bow on. He fed me to Isolde just to save his own miserable skin.”

“He let her catch you.” My breath catches.

“He did worse than let her.” Her jaw works, and now the rage is pained, hurt. “When it all came apart, when I was on my knees in front of that court with her people holding me down, do you know what he said? He looked his queen in the eye, and he told her I had drugged him. Bewitched him. That the rogue serving girl had slipped something in his wine and worked some low mountain cheap trick on him, that he’d never once wanted me, that everything, all three years of it, was a spell I’d cast to climb ranks and dig gold. He called me a witch to save himself. And she-” a hollow laugh, “-she didn’t fully believe him. I saw it in her face. Isolde was too clever to swallow his cowardice. But she let him keep his lie, because a queen with a bewitched husband is a wronged woman, and a queen whose consort simply chose a serving girl over her is something else. She took the version that cost her the least. And then she called a hunt.” Her breath feathers as she swallows. “That woman had always been a fucking psychopath. A sadistic demon. The Alpha queen set me free into the forest, and declared open season. She put my head as a prize, rewarding whoever could rip out my heart a chest of pure eastern gold, and with that, set them loose after me, and they nearly tore me apart, limb to limb, if I hadn’t been Devika Chamberlain Black.”

I can’t breathe, because I am doing the math, the dates lining up one after another like a lock turning, and the answer is horrible.

“The baby,” I say, and my voice is so hollow, so weak. “The child that ruined your whole life. That’s-”

“You,” she says.

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