TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 487

CHAPTER 410. YOUR LAST TOLL

CHAPTER 410: YOUR LAST TOLL

EMBER’S POV

“So yes,” I say aloud, and Silas looks up, because he doesn’t know what I’m answering. But Knox does. Knox’s eyes find mine, and hold. “You asked if it’s worth it. Worth the war. Worth the carnage. Worth conquering a god.” I don’t look away from Knox. “Yes. He’s worth all of it. He’s worth every single bit of it, and more than I have to give.”

Silas frowns, slow, and looks between the two of us, and something in his scarred face

closes like he’s understood more than I said.

“Goddess help you both,” Silas mutters, and then he pushes himself up out of his chair. “But wishes don’t open my doors. The house has delivered on its promise. It’s time to settle what’s owed. The toll you paid earlier was just to drag the truth out of my sister. But walking out of this mountain with that truth is another matter entirely. The Slaughterhouse does not let anyone keep what they came for for free. That’s the last law of this place. If you try to cross that threshold without paying, the house will take it all back. It will wipe your minds clean at the door. You will walk out, and you will not remember a single word she said tonight. Every secret and name, all of this suffering will be for nothing. To keep the truth you won tonight, you must buy it. One memory each, laid down of your own free will, or you leave here completely empty. Decide wisely.”

My stomach drops. “But we already paid-”

“You paid to ask. This is the price of carrying it out.” His dark eyes are grave. “I don’t make the rules, I’m sorry. It’s simply what this mountain has always been.”

Knox and I look at each other, deliberating.

And before I can even begin to reckon what I could bear to lose, my mother laughs.

“I know exactly what I’m giving,” Devika says, and lifts her head. There is a frantic, hollow kind of peace settling over her features. “I want to forget her. All of it. Ember. Maurice. Rhovan. Every day of the running, the terror, the drugging, and the hiding in the dirt. I want the house to reach into my skull and rip out every single thread that ties me to any of it.”

My heart stills.

Her chin stays high. But a single tear spills over her lower lashes, carving a slow, wet path through her flawless makeup.

She doesn’t even feel it.

CHAPTER 410 YOUR LAST TOLL

+25 Points

“Because when Isolde comes-and she is coming-I refuse to be dragged to the slaughter with the rest of you. I have run for twenty-six years, and I am so goddamn tired. The only way I walk out of this mountain free is if there is nothing left inside me to find.” Another tear falls, sliding off her jaw to hit the table. And then another. Her voice stays dead, cruel, utterly disconnected from the violent grief her body is leaking. “They will find no child. No lover. No secret worth torturing out of me. They will find no Devika. I sever myself from the whole rotting past tonight. Let it be your burden now, not mine.” Her wet eyes flick to me, empty and hard. “You were always going to be the death of me, girl. Let me forget you before you finally finish the job.”

should not hurt.

monster. She drugged me, she abandoned me, she told me to die in a puddle of my ood in Gale’s house, and she sold me to a room full of killers tonight.

w exactly what she is.

I am sitting across a table from my mother, and she is crying while she begs a machine erase me from her mind.

And the starved, beaten chil wanted her mother to bru choking the life out of h

Because some idiot, that if we stripped

at me and decid

“You’re cry

Devika

brus

ed inside me my entire life-the little girl who just girl who screamed for her when her husband was

me had been hoping, right up to the very last second,

r and the lies, there was a mother in there who would look

eping.

words tear my throat open.

ows in genuine, cold irritation. She reaches up, her fingers mes away wet.

ure on her fingertips, and for the first time tonight, pure, unadulterated

face.

hokes, a sudden, panicked hitch catching in her chest. She touches her eath speeding up. “Why am I crying?”

soul knows what you’re doing,” I say, and the tears are pouring down my face blinding. “Because under all that venom and the bitterness and the ice, I am ter. You birthed me. You carried me through the worst time of your life. And you’re

nows it.” rase my existence, and

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