TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 479

CHAPTER 402; THE SOVEREIGN BITCH

EMBER’S POV

My eyes snap to him and my chest caves, because I have never heard this, not once, not in all our nights, and he’s laying it on a rogue’s scale like loose change.

But he keeps the pain clean off his voice, and he will not look at me, because if he looks at me, he won’t be able to do it. So I do the only thing I can.

I squeeze his hand, hard. I’m here. I have you. You don’t have to carry it alone. And his hand squeezes back, once, and that’s all, and that’s everything.

Devika studies the memory laid out on the glowing silver scale, and something moves through even her face.

“Damn, that’s a dark one, King.” She sits back, eyes half-lidded, the gambler measuring the pot. “Hmm. To take it, or not.”

The scale hums between us, light buzzing, waiting.

Then Devika leans forward and accepts the wager.

The magic reaches for him instantly. It seizes Knox, snapping his head violently backwards as it rips the toll from his body.

A second later, it releases him, and he returns heaving for air. He blinks rapidly, a rare confusion clouding his eyes for just a heartbeat before he shakes it off and grounds himself again.

“Very well. You’ve paid in full and then some, so you’ll have the whole of it, King, every last piece.” Her eyes come to me, and for once there’s no venom in them. “But to understand how the wolf got into you, you have to understand what your wolf truly is. And almost everything I know of that I know because Esmerelda told me. She was Isolde’s closest confidante for thirty years. She knew the truth of that court the way no serving girl ever could, and in the years she came north to me, she talked. Goddess, how she talked and wrote down as much as she could. She carried books of secrets, some of which she shared with me because they were now my problem, and some she saved for her little journals.” She folds her hands. “So this is Esmerelda’s knowledge, passed to me, passed now to you.”

She draws a breath.

“The silver wolf is not just any wolf, Ember. Not the way you think of one. She is the Carrion Maiden, and she is a proud god. Ancient beyond the reckoning of the East, older than Caelora itself, an undefeated war-spirit who has never once in all of history been thrown down. She is the reason the East is a matriarchy at all. She is the secret in the marrow of it, the true crown, the thing that makes a queen a queen and every other house kneel. Whoever the Maiden lives in rules, because there is no fighting a god who lives in the veins of a woman.” Her voice drops. “And she does not simply pass at birth. That was the short version. The truth is stranger. The Silver Maiden manifests. She leaves one host when a new branch is opened at childbirth, goes on a search, and then, years later, wakes in the one she has chosen, at a certain age of childhood, all at once. It’s why the Caelora girls are trained from the cradle, drilled and shaped and made ready, so that when the Maiden comes looking, she’ll find them worthy and choose one of them.” She gives a thin, terrible smile. “That’s the part they never say aloud. The Maiden chooses. She is not merely inherited. She is not commanded. She looks into a soul and decides whether it’s fit to carry a

CHAPTER 40 THE SOVEREIGN BUTCH

+25 Powis

war god, and if it isn’t, she simply will not some, and there is nothing a queen or a bloodline or a thousand years of breeding can do to force her. Esmerelda had ceined a nickname for the Wolf,” my mother gives a wry smile. “She called her the Sovereign Bitch. Said she was the only entity in the Great East more arrogant than the

and a thousand times the pain in the ass to please.”

Well. That sou

“And she

“Yes

of

Sapphire.

or Isolde’s daughters,” Knox says, catching on.

hid this truth from her own people, the Silver Wolf simply wouldn’t come for either gleam. “Esmerelda told me why, though she’d never have dared say it in the aiden is a proud, vicious thing, a goddess of carrion and war, and a spirit like that will ared with a host cut from the same cloth. She needs a balance. A counterweight.

o hold against all that ruthless hunger, or the two of them together becorne a horror the Vive. And the Caelora line-” she laughs, low and bitter, “-the Caelora line has been rotting s. Proud, cruel, haughty, every heir groomed to be harder than the last. Elara and Seravina be worthy, and they were bred to be exactly the wrong thing. The Maiden looked at Isolde’s less, beautifully-trained daughters and found nothing in either of them she could stand to oul with. So she refused. Year after year. And the East began to come apart at the seams.”

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