TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 485

< CHAPTER 408: THERE MUST BE A WAY

CHAPTER 408: THERE MUST BE A WAY

EMBER’S POV

Not from Devika, who only knows what a spy once told her. Not from Silas, who deals in secrets and rogues and has never once touched anything divine.

Not from Knox, whose hand tightens on mine because there is nothing he can buy or break or bleed for me here.

The silence stretches, and the gravity of things settles over the room, and I understand that I have finally reached the edge of everything anyone at this table knows, and past it there is only me and a war-god who thinks I’m nothing.

And it’s Silas who breaks it, and I wish he hadn’t.

“I hate,” he says hesitantly, “to be the one to put out a hopeful little fire. But somebody at this table has to say the thing the rest of you are dancing around.” He sets his huge scarred hands flat on the black wood. “You all keep talking about waking this wolf as if it’s salvation. As if the answer to a queen hunting her is to become strong enough to fight back. But you heard my sister. Waking that wolf is a suicide mission. It’s the flare. The very act of becoming what you need to be to survive Isolde is the act that brings Isolde down on us.” His dark eyes move around the table, grim. “And not just on the girl. On me. On this mountain. They’ll come for my sister, and come for my people. You wake that thing, and you don’t just invite the Alpha Queen, you call the whole Great East, an army older than any of our thrones, down onto the North.” He looks at Knox. “Onto your gates, King. Your lands. Your home.”

“Another war,” Knox says, low.

“Another war,” Silas agrees. “One that ends one of two ways. They drag her back east in chains to serve out her life as a stolen crown they’ve finally reclaimed. Or they decide a bastard who carried their wolf where it never belonged is too dangerous to keep breathing, and they make an example of her that the whole continent remembers for a hundred years.” His voice hardens. “There is no version of waking this wolf that does not end in blood. A great deal of it. So before any of you speak another hopeful word – is it worth that? Is she worth a war?”

And Knox’s jaw tightens.

He doesn’t answer Silas. He turns his head and looks at me, and his voice, when it comes, is pitched low and meant only for me.

“I’d raze this entire continent before I let anyone take you. I want that understood by everyone at this table. The East, the queen, the whole rotten Great East and every army it’s ever fielded

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CHAPTER 408: THERE MUST BE A WAY

+25 Points

they can come. They will find me standing between them and her, and they will have to pry her out of my cold dead hands, and even then I’ll find a way to make it cost them everything.” His burning gaze doesn’t leave mine. “So don’t ask me if she’s worth a war, rogue. There is no world I’m in where she isn’t.”

“No one is taking me anywhere,” I say, and my voice steadies, because his does that to me. I’m not a fugitive to be dragged home. I’m not a prize. There has to be another way through this that isn’t war.” I look at my mother. “Isolde thinks I stole her wolf. Fine. Then we talk to her. We explain. She’s not you said yourself she isn’t unjust; she weighs things; she believes in her own fairness. If she understood I never asked for this, never wanted it, was

–

hidden from it my whole life-”

Devika laughs.

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