TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 481

CHAPTER 404: SHE CHOSE YOU

EMBER’S POV

“You were small at the time. Three, maybe four.” Her voice drops toward the floor. “You had a doll, and you carried it everywhere. Named it yourself, the first name you ever gave anything.-”

And something moves in the deepest, a cold thread pulling up from a place I’ve never once been able to reach, and before she can say it, my own mouth opens and the name falls out like it’s been waiting my whole life.

“Molly.”

Devika goes chalk-white.

“Yes. Molly.”

“I remember-” and it’s surfacing now, dredged up from under years of suppression. “I remember playing with her in the dirt. I brought her things. I made her-” my breath catches, “-I made her tea parties. I brought her flowers. I thought she talked to me. Mother, I remember thinking my doll was talking to me, telling me to-”

“It wasn’t the doll,” Devika says quietly, and the whole room goes quiet.

“W-What?”

Devika sighs.

“They found you in the daycare yard one day. The whole place had gone really quiet, and when they came looking, they found you sitting in the dirt with Molly, having your little tea party, and arranged around you, in perfect circles, were… dead things. Dozens of them. Mice, birds, beetles, a stray cat. They were all fresh. And the workers swore to me, hysterical, half of them quit that week, that they’d watched some of them come. Birds dropping out of the trees. Things crawling up out of the woods to lie down in your circles and die there, at your doll’s feet. And when the teacher tried to pull you away, you looked up at her with your eyes gone pure blazing silver, and you said, don’t interrupt them. They came to bow to Molly.”

The nausea comes so hard I sway in the chair.

Because I remember.

The smell. The copper-sweet of it, the thing I always told myself was flowers, the scent I’ve caught in a hundred nightmares and never once been able to name.

It was never flowers.

It was blood. My beautiful arrangements for Molly were corpses, and was three years old, and I was smiling.

“That’s the Carrion Maiden,” Knox says softly. “Carrion. The dead. She woke in a toddler, and the first thing she did was call the dead to bow.”

“And Isolde felt it,” Devika says. “The moment she woke in you, every soul who ever carried her essence felt the silver blaze across the world, Isolde loudest of all. The Alpha Queen was not a woman who was

< CHAPTERACT SHE CHOSE YOU

easy to foul, you see. She knew what she felt, and she was dead-set on finding out where it came from. But smerelda got to me first, because she’d been watching me from afar, because she’d half-suspected since the night she cut a false heart to save you. She came to the North in fury, terrified, and she told me the truth of what you were, and what would happen if Isolde ever felt that beacon again. The best temporary solution was suppressants. Hundreds of them. Never to be missed. Esmerelda said you needed to be so saturated by the drug that you’d never reach the Silver Wolf again. And then-” Devika’s jaw works, “–then she tried to the situation. The only way the East knew how.”

“The two girls,” I read

“That’s why the years running

Because th

and force

one of

times

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