TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 486

CHAPTER 409. ALL FOR HIM

CHAPTER 409: ALL FOR HIM

EMBER’S POV

“No.”

It’s out of me before she finishes.

“No. Absolutely not.” I’m shaking my head, my stomach turning at the thought. “I want nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with that man. You’ve described him to me for the last hour, Mother. He’s a snake who betrayed the woman who loved him, who tried to force you to kill me, who handed you to a hunt to save his own skin. He might be no different from you.” The words are gut-punching, and I don’t take them back. “You want me to walk into the East and shake hands with my monster of a father to murder a woman? I won’t. I won’t take a life, and I especially won’t take hers.” I meet the whole table. “Because here’s the thing none of you wants to say plainly. Isolde isn’t wrong. Not really. Her wolf was stolen from her line. Her crown is sleeping in me. If someone took my family’s whole legacy and hid it in a stranger’s child, I’d hunt it too. She’s cruel, and she’s dangerous, and she wants me dead – but she’s not wrong to see me as a thief. Because I am one. I’m carrying the thing her family bled for, for a thousand years, and I didn’t even ask for it.” My throat tightens. “I won’t add murdering the woman I stole from to the list of things I never chose.”

The table is silent.

“Then what,” Silas says, not unkindly. “If you won’t run, and you won’t kill her, and you won’t hand yourself over – what’s your plan, girl?”

And I don’t have one. But something is forming, hard and stubborn.

“I get strong,” I say slowly. “Not to attack. Not to march east and start a war. To become something Isolde can’t simply reach out and take. Right now I’m simply a confused girl she can send men to collect. I want to become an equal. Strong enough that if it ever comes to a table, I’m sitting at it as someone she has to negotiate with, not a child she drags home in chains.” I lift my chin. “I don’t have the whole of it yet. I found all this out an hour ago. But I know I won’t spend the rest of my life being hunted and hollow and waiting for the day she comes. I’d rather become undeniable, and then decide what I do with it. From strength. On my own terms. Not hers, and not his.”

Silas studies me for a long moment, and I brace for him to call it naive, because it is.

“That’s not a plan,” he says finally. “That’s a prayer you’re begging the goddess heeds to.” But there’s something almost like respect under it. “Still. It’s more than most people manage the night their whole life burns down. I’ll give you that.”

FOR HIM

And under all of it, there’s the reason I haven’t said out loud. The real one.

Because when Silas asked if she was worth a war, and Knox’s jaw tightened, I met his eyes, and I understood something I’ll carry out of this mountain.

Knox’s feral gene is still a loose end.

Whatever that bloody vision with Raphael actually means, the threat is still out there waiting for us. Alongside Raphael himself.

Which means there is a very real version of the future where I don’t win. A version where Phantom snaps the leash, where Knox goes completely feral, and bodies drop.

Including mine.

And countless others.

I absolutely refuse to let that happen. I will not let the man I love lose his mind to a damned curse-to the exact same virus that tore his family to shreds.

When the restraints finally come off-when the fighting gets bad enough that Knox is forced to release everything-someone has to be strong enough to reach him in the dark.

Someone has to pull him back. There has to be one force in this world that a King in a full, feral bloodlust will still bow to.

Nathaniel is leaving soon. Soon, we won’t have his genius contingencies or his chemical injections to fall back on as a safety net.

That leaves me.

Only me.

So it isn’t just about surviving Isolde. It’s about being strong enough to save Knox from himself when the day comes.

Strong enough to make sure we never become another Greenvale, another massacre with his

name on it.

Strong enough that when the beast rises, I can meet it, hold it, and bring my King back-so that when we finally mark each other, we do it in peace, and not damning ourselves.

I have to heal him.

That’s why I have to conquer her.

That’s why I have to bring a god to her knees.

Not for a throne for fr

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