TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 480

CHAPTER 403: BEHEAD HIS QUEEN

EMBER’S POV

She leans in, and this is where the dread starts to build in her voice.

“You have to understand what that meant, Ember. Esmerelda watched it happen from the inside, and it terrified even her. Isolde bluffed all she could, parading Elara as the chosen one, but the people are as clever as their queen, and they refused to be fooled for too long. A Caelora without the Silver Wolf is a wounded thing, and every hungry house in the East could smell it. The queen with no god. The throne with no teeth. Isolde grew more frightened every season the wolf stayed lost, and a frightened Isolde is a monstrous one, because that woman answers fear with blood. Executions. Purges. Anyone who whispered that the Silver Maiden might be gone for good simply vanished. The whole court began walking on glass, waiting, praying one of the girls would manifest and end it. And they never did. Because the Maiden was already gone.” Her eyes fix on me. “She’d already chosen. She’d followed your father’s essence out of that palace and into a rogue’s belly and woken, years later, in you.”

“Wait.” I hold up a hand, because something doesn’t fit. “You said the Maiden only answers to her host. That she lived in Isolde. If she was Isolde’s, in Isolde’s body, in Isolde’s blood, then what does Rhovan have to do with any of it? He’s not the host. You said the men never carry her at all. So how does a consort’s essence put the Silver Wolf in me? Where did he get anything to pass down?”

And Devika smiles, slow and cold, because I’ve asked the exact right question,

“Now you understand why your father was such a ravenous snake.” She leans back. “The Maiden answers only to her host, yes. Isolde. The wolf herself would never so much as look at a man. But the host does not carry a god alone, Ember. An Alpha Queen chooses her Lord from among the men who court her, and a Lord is not simply a mate, not simply a lover to warm her bed and her throne. He shares in her. The silver Maiden responds more strongly to a mate-bond, always has, and so she blesses the union she approves

and so of by extending her essence through the mating mark into the man the queen has chosen. He never touches Silver Wolf. He never carries her, never wields her, never once feels her mind against his. But he basks in everything she is.” Her eyes gleam. “He grows stronger than any of his peers. Heals faster than any wolf alive. Becomes a mate worthy of a beast as proud as her. He becomes a demi-god simply by association with the Alpha Queen. That is what a Lord of Caelora truly is.”

The horror of it dawns slowly.

“That’s why he wanted the throne.”

“That was his whole design,” Devika says softly, and there’s an old, bitter admiration in it. “Do you see it now? Court her. Become her favourite. Let her choose him, mark him, pour her essence into him through the bond. And then, once he was stronger than any man in the East, once he carried a fragment of the very thing that made her untouchable-” her mouth curls, “-kill her. Behead his queen with the power she gave him. Take Caelora and rule it the way he thought it was meant to be ruled. He spent years being the

perfe

beloved consort, and the whole time he was sharpening the sword she’d handed him

man I loved, Ember. That was the man whose dreams I lay in the dark and believed.”

in him-”

Jer eyes hold mine. “So his children are blessed by it too, even the ones Peyerself. Elara. Seravina. They were born with her essence in their blood,

CHAPTERAST SCHED HIS QUEEN

+25 Ports

stronger than any ordinary wolf, faster, harder, more powerful, simply for being Rhovan’s, even if the Maiden never chose either of them.” A hollow, terrible laugh follows. “And when I fucked him, night after

night for three years, in his queen’s own palace. Well. Let’s just say you got the royal upgrade, girl. His essence went into you the same as it went into Elara and Seravina. It made you kin to a god. It made you recognisable to the Silver Wolf. And it opened the one door in the world she needed to walk through to reach a rogue bastard in a gutter.” Her voice drops. “Your father tried to steal power to murder his queen. Instead, it made you. The one thing that could unseat Isolde far more surely than lie ever could have.”

The room has gone dead silent.

“Fucking hell,” Silas breathes, staring at me in awe.

But Knox has the opposite expression of pure horror.

I don’t imagine learning that your to-be wife is the biggest chess piece on a deadly board is comforting.

“When,” I say, my voice weak. “When did the Silver Wolf wake in me?”

And Devika sobers, her face darkening.

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