TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 477

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< CHAPTER 400 PREGNANT AND HUNTED

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CHAPTER 400: PREGNANT AND HUNTED

EMBER’S POV

I hate that it moves me. I hate it more than anything she’s said tonight. And I don’t let it show on my face.

Under the table, Knox’s hand turns and closes over mine, an anchor, the only thing keeping me

upright, and I hold onto him like a woman going under, because I am.

“That’s enough,” Knox says. “She doesn’t need it framed like-”

“She asked, King.” Devika finally shifts her gaze from mine, and the poison is back in them. “The house deals in truth. That’s my truth.”

“Then here’s one back.” Knox’s voice could split stone. “It’s rather pathetic that you think not killing her was your one moment of weakness. It wasn’t. It was the only moment of true strength you

have ever had in your miserable, selfish life. And it terrified you so much that you spent the next two decades punishing her for it. You lost your filthy silk and your golden palace, but the real tragedy is that you were given a daughter worth a thousand of those things, and you were just too cowardly to ever deserve her.”

Her eyes cut to him, startled, and for a breath, something flashes across her face. Something truly

hurt and miserable.

“But you got out,” I say, dragging the story forward, because if I sit with these emotions for too

long, I’d break down. “You had a big bounty on your head, and an entire pack sent out with the

single order to kill you. How does that girl walk out of Caelora alive?”

“Because of Esmerelda,” Devika says the name like it’s the one clean thing in the whole rotten

story. “Esmerelda Winterlock. The queen’s own, Ember. Her favourite shadow. Or Beta, if you look at things that way. The most trusted woman in that whole poisoned court, and do you know what she truly was?” A thin, knowing smile. “A spy. She was the finest the East ever made. Isolde sent her out into the world for decades, into the North most of all, and Esmerelda did the impossible.

She married into it. Into one of your Northern packs, deep, close to the heart of your world.” Her

eyes flick to Knox and away. “You’ll ask how a wolf marries a stranger and never feels the lie, King, and the answer is the thing that made her worth more to Isolde than an army. Esmerelda had a clever craft. She could fake a mate bond. There’s a rare eastern gem that fools a wolf into feeling a true mate-bond where there is none. A counterfeit so perfect the wolf itself can’t tell. She wore it

into a pack, took a mate who never once suspected his own bond was a lie, and lived there for

years as one of them. Trusted. Beloved. Family. And the whole time she fed Isolde everything,

every secret worth the having, every weakness, every move. So while the North believed the East

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CHAPTER 400 PREGNANT AND HUNTED

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had moved on to better interests, they have been sitting closer, far more closer, to the crown than

you’d assume.”

My heart seizes.

Knox has gone very still beside me. I feel it, that honed focus, a man catching a thread. But he says nothing, only files whatever’s turning behind those flat grey eyes.

My mind burns with a million questions. Does Knox know Esmerelda? How does anyone guess their mate bond was false? That would be a wild goose chase.

“And when the hunt was called on me,” Devika goes on, “Esmerelda was the one Isolde charged

with the ending. Understand what that hunt was, Ember. It was no mere execution. Isolde doesn’t

waste a good death on a clean killing. She declared me open game. She put my head to the whole

court as a prize and promised a reward to whoever ran me down and tore me open, and she meant to sit back and enjoy the sport of it. A pregnant rogue girl chased through her own trees like a hare, ripped to pieces for a chest of gold.” Her hands tighten. “And Esmerelda, her most trusted,

was the one meant to stand over what was left of me when they’d finished, collect the heart, and

serve it to the queen in her two hands. Bring me back Devika’s heart, Isolde told her. Let me hold it.

“But she didn’t,” I breathe.

“She got me out instead. She slid me past the hunters, past guards that should have been

watching a door and weren’t. She sent me north with a false trail behind me. And she brought

Isolde a heart, all right, because she was too clever not to. A false one. Some poor animal’s, still

warm, and she swore on her place at the queen’s side that the rogue and her bastard had been run

down and torn apart and left rotting in eastern ground.” A hollow breath. “And Isolde believed it. Or

I hope she did. The hunt was called off. I was dead. And I have prayed for years she never learns how good a liar her favourite could be.” Her eyes go distant. “I never understood why Esmerelda risked everything for me. I think she’d stood at Isolde’s shoulder too long, watched her dish cruelty as justice, and finally found one she couldn’t let happen. Maybe because I was pregnant. Maybe because I was just twenty-two. Maybe because I… was scared.”

Everywhere is dead silent now, my heart only a soft thud in my chest.

“So I ran,” Devika says. “Pregnant, hunted, dead on paper, everything I ever wanted burning behind

1. And I did the only thing left to a woman with nothing. I found a new man.” Her lip curls. ”

Maurice. I thought he was an alpha with money, someone who could put walls around me and

keep the East off my throat. By the time I learned he was a driver, a nobody, a soft little busboy

who couldn’t guard a house cat, I’d already passed your father’s child off as his and let him mate

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