TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 488

<CHAPTER MOTHER PLEASE

CHAPTER 411: MOTHER, PLEASE

EMBER’S POV

Devika freezes. Her hands drop from her wet face.

For a long, terrible moment, she just stares at me. And then, right in front of my eyes, the ice finally cracks. The monster dies.

Twenty-six years of survival comes crashing down, and the woman under it caves in.

‘Because that’s what he called me,” she whispers. It is the softest, most broken Sound I have ever heard her make. “Rhovan. When it was just the two of us, in the dark. When I was the only thing in the world he wanted. He’d take my face in his hands and he’d call me his spark in the dark. His ember. The little fire that <ept catching no matter how the world tried to put it out.”

Devika reaches across the black table.

Her hand is trembling violently, her knuckles white. And when her cold, shaking fingers gently cup my wet cheek, the breath violently leaves my lungs.

It is the first time in my entire life my mother has touched me with tenderness.

I let out a wounded, suffocated noise and lean into her palm. She smells like some choking perfume and fake designers. And she is here. My mother is finally, finally here.

“So when they put you in my arms,” Devika weeps, her thumb tracing my cheekbone, looking at me like I am the most precious, devastating thing in the whole world. “When they handed me this screaming, bleeding child that I was supposed to hate-I looked at you, and I couldn’t call you anything else. I named the thing that ruined my life after the one word that ever made me feel loved. Because in some way, in that moment, you were my spark. You were my hope to run for another day. You were my courage to fight to live. You were my Ember long before I grew to hate the light you carried.”

“Mom,” I sob, my hands flying up to grip her wrist, holding her hand desperately against my face. “Mom, please.”

“I told myself it was cruelty. That you’d be my wound and my punishment,” she cries, her own face twisting in pure agony. “But I didn’t know how to be a mother, I didn’t know how to love you when loving you meant Isolde would find us and flay us both alive. I didn’t know how to love you when you took away everything from me. I had to hate you, Ember. I had to make you nothing to me, or I would have died for you! I named you the only tender thing I had left, because I knew you were the last piece of him I’d ever get to keep. And I can’t bear to keep holding on.”

“No, you don’t get to do that. You don’t get to take the easy way out!” I beg her. I am practically hyperventilating, my fingers digging into her skin, holding onto her hand like I am drowning in freezing water. “You don’t get to just erase me when I’m not even done hating you! You owe me the burden of remembering me! I’ll stay away. I swear to the Goddess, I will never look for you again. You can cross the continent and pretend I died. Hate me, resent me, let me be a nightmare to you, I don’t care! Just let me exist in your head. Just let me have a mother somewhere in this world who remembers my fucking face! Please, Mom. Please.”

Devika stares at me. Tears are streaming down her face, her thumb stroking my cheek one last time. She

<CHAPTER4MOTHER, PLEASE

ie looking at my eyes, my nose, my mouth.

A mother committing her child’s face to memory, right before she burns it to ash.

+25 Point

“I am so sorry, my little spark,” she whispers, her voice breaking into a thousand pieces. “You deserved better. You deserved so much. In no world did a light such as yours deserve to have me as a mother. I took your entire childhood and made it a punishment for a crime you didn’t commit. Maybe in another world, without the terror and the running might have been better. I might have known how to just hold you. I might have known how to love you. But in this one, you have far worse ahead of you, and I wouldn’t make it any better. I would only ever be a noose around your neck.”

She swallows hard, the tears pouring down her face.

“If you ever meet that bastard of a man named Rhovan… kill him for me, would you? Carve his heart out for everything he stole from us. But I am so, so tired, Ember. Make the Blacks proud. I know my mother would have looked at you and seen a god. And I know… Goddess, know deep down somewhere, I am proud of you, too. I spent your whole life trying to crush you down, and you still grew to be everything I wa too much of a coward to be. I both envy and admire you for it. You are magnificent. I am so sorry, Ember.”

And then she pulls her hand away.

The cold air hits my wet face where her fingers just were, and the rejection hits my chest like a shotgun blast.

I got the mother I always prayed for. I got her for exactly thirty seconds. And she is still choosing to leave

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