TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 476

CHAPTER 399 A MOTHER AND HER CHLD

+25 Point

CHAPTER 399: A MOTHER AND HER CHLD

EMBER’S POV

She looks at me across the table, dead-eyed, beaten down to the bone, and she does not hide a

single bit of her resentment.

“Yes, Ember. You. You were the pregnancy that got me caught. You were the thing that cost me the palace and the expensive silk and the man I loved and the only happiness I was ever given. You

ruined my entire life by the simple act of beginning to exist, and I have never once in my years been

able to look at your face without seeing everything I lost. So when you ask me why I could never

love you the way a mother’s meant to-there. There’s your answer. You were my new grave. My

new permanent mountain. Tell me how a woman learns to love her own captor.”

“I was your child!” I spit, the words tearing out of my throat before I can stop them. I slam my

hands down, the rage blinding me. “Your own blood! You do not get to blame me for decisions you

made long before I was even born! It is your fault you are in this mess. It is your fault your life got

destroyed! It is all your fault, Devika Chamberlain Black!”

“Shut your fucking mouth!” Devika roars, ripping forward, her face contorting into something

demonic. “I am in this because I gave you a chance to live! I threw away my entire existence so you

could have a chance to breathe, you ungrateful little wretch!”

The silence that crashes down after her outburst is stifling. Devika is heaving, her chest rising and

falling violently.

I stare at her.

“Then here’s a thing I don’t understand,” I say, and my voice is shaking now. “If I was your new

grave. If I was the thing that cost you everything. If I was the one thing that separated you from

your one true love, then why am I here? You’re the most self-preserving creature I’ve ever known,

Mother. You climbed over a woman’s corpse to save yourself. You had every reason in the world to

be rid of me. It was the obvious thing. It was the Devika thing to do. So why didn’t you? Why go

against even Rhovan to keep a child alive?”

And for the first time all night, Devika will not look at me.

Her eyes drop to the table, to her own hands, to anywhere that isn’t my face, and when she speaks, her voice has gone strange and stripped of all its poison, almost as confused as a child.

“I… don’t know.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit-”

8

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CHAPTER 399 A MOTHER AND HER CHLD

+25 Points

“I don’t know, Ember! Do you think I haven’t asked myself? Every day of your life I asked myself.” She meets my gaze now, fierce, blurred with tears, but she blinks them away fast, avoiding my face altogether. “It was the obvious choice. Rhovan begged me to do it. Every reasoning part of me knew it was the only sane thing left, that a bastard with that blood would only ever be a rope around my neck. I had a hundred chances. Before you were born. On the road. In the North. After

you were born, when you cried in the night, and I stood over you, and it would have been so easy, so quick.” Her jaw trembles. “And I couldn’t. I would pick up my hands to do it, and they would not move. I chose myself over every soul I have ever known, my brother, my madam, the man I loved, threw every one of them to the wolves to save my own skin, and the one time it would have cost

me nothing and saved me everything, I couldn’t do it. To you. I don’t know why. I have never known

why.”

And something pricks in my chest when she lifts her teary face and finally meets my gaze.

And there she is.

A mother.

A mother staring at her child.

At the one thing she could not put her own selfishness above..

The prick in my chest extends to an ache I can’t name, a crack that forces moisture to my eyes. Hot, prickly and far from convenient.

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