TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 482

CHAPTER 405 MY HALF SISTERS

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CHAPTER 405: MY HALF-SISTERS

EMBER’S POV

“So they gave up,” Devika says. “Esmerelda gave up. When the ritual failed the third time, she told me the truth, plainly, the way only she ever did. That the Maiden had chosen you and would not be moved, not by ritual, not by anything, and that meant there was only one thing left to do. If we couldn’t take the god out of you, we had to keep her asleep inside you. Forever. Buried so deep she never woke, never blazed, never gave Isolde a single thread to follow home.” Her eyes lift to mine, wet now. “That’s when the higher grade pills began, Ember. They knocked off most of your childhood memories. Everything your wolf had touched was simply beyond reach. And they made you useless. Not just weak, but too docile to lash out. Too docile to feel emotions strong enough to reach your wolf. I don’t know where I went wrong, or how you were able to break through and reach your wolf. But everything I did, I did to hide you. To keep a wolf leashed so that the most dangerous woman in the world would go on believing the thing she’d lost was gone for good. And it worked. Every day, dose after dose, year after year, it worked. You grew up hollow and wolfless and pathetic and hating yourself for it, and it worked, and I would do it again, because the alternative was Isolde standing over your cradle. The alternative was inviting hell back into my life.”

And I sit there, and I cannot breathe, because it all comes down on me at once.

The Silver Wolf choosing me three times over a queen’s daughters, the two little girls I now know were Elara and Seravina, my half-sisters. Where are they now? Do they remember me? Would I recognise them?

So many questions churn through me.

Why would Sapphire choose me? Why call me pathetic if she had rejected every other option for me? Why call me too weak for her?

“What happened to Esmelrelda?” Knox asks. “Does she still come to the North? Is she still a spy in my territory?”

“Esmerelda stopped coming.” Devika’s voice breaks. “One day, she just stopped showing up with no crates. No pills. No word. Never again. And there is only one reason a woman that careful, that deep, that trusted, simply vanishes off the face of the world.” Her hands tremble. “Isolde must have found out what her favourite had done. And if she has Esmerelda, if she ever made that woman talk-then everything I built is already ash. She must know that I’m alive. She must know that there’s a child. She must know that the Maiden chose a bastard and slept in her all these years.” She looks at me, hollow and afraid. “And she is coming, Ember. Maybe not today. Maybe not this year. But a queen does not lose her god and simply let it go. She is coming for what’s hers. And what’s hers is you.”

“Then she can have the disappointment of finding me,” I say, but my voice doesn’t sound as confident as the way I want it to.

How can I possibly fight against a woman like Isolde? A woman my mother had rightfully wronged.

How can I protect myself against an entire pack of enemies?

What does any of this mean for me?

Knox hasn’t moved. He’s been still through the last of it, that dangerous stillness, and when he finally speaks, his voice is distant

CHAPTER 405MY HALF SISTERS

+25 Points

“There is one thing I’m curious about. Esmerelda.” His grey eyes stay level on my mother. “A spy that excellent and embedded in the North for decades isn’t an asset you just throw away. If Isolde pulled her back to the East, she wouldn’t have left the territory blind. She would have planted someone new to keep watching. So tell me, Devika.” His jaw tightens. “Who replaced her?”

Devika looks at him for a long moment.

Then she smiles, an unpleasant, ugly thing.

“That is a question of your own, King, about your own house. It has nothing to do with what I came here owing my daughter.” She tips her head at me. “The house measures what she asks. If you want to know who’s been sleeping under your roof and reporting east all these years, then you wager for it yourself, and you pray you can afford the answer.”

And Knox goes very, very still.

We knew there was a rat, but if they are still here, right now… who is it? Hale? Marjorie? Someone who sits at our table and smiles at us? One of the guards who nods to me in the hall every morning?

Devika watches both our faces. She watches the paranoia take root, and she leans forward.

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