Semua Bab TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING: Bab 161 - Bab 170

EMBER’S POVRafael’s jaw tightens. Something moves behind his eyes, a strange hurt that twists my chest in the wrong way. Nonetheless, he steps back and raises both hands, palms out.“Fine.” He drops the manila envelope at my feet. It hits the floor with a heavy thud. “I’m not taking it back with me. It’s yours. Your truth. Your choice what to do with it.”He walks to the door and pauses.“But when he breaks your heart today — and he will, Ember, because that’s what he does — don’t say I didn’t try to save you from it.”He leaves. The door clicks shut behind him.I stand there for a long time, staring at the envelope on the floor.The temptation is almost torture. A gravitational pull toward the answers I’ve been chasing since yesterday morning, since I crouched in the snow and heard Nathaniel say words that rearranged everything I thought I knew.I could pick it up. Open it. Read whatever’s inside and KNOW, finally, definitively, what 2016 means and what Knox did and whether the man

EMBER’S POVRafael’s smile doesn’t phase. “Oh, please. I made it too easy for you last night. You had your chance to kill me and you didn’t take it.” He tilts his head, something cold settling behind those grey eyes. “I don’t intend to make it that easy next time.”Knox lunges forward — fast, violent, closing the distance in two strides with his fist already cocked — but Rafael only looks past Knox’s incoming fury, locks eyes with me, and says it.“Tell her about 2016, Knox. If you’re so interested in forcing secrets into the open, then honour Rayana’s little therapy bullshit and give your woman what she wants. Tell her what you did, bastard. Show her what you really are.” He pauses, letting a wicked smile graze his lips. “If you trust your fucking schoolboy feelings for her, then give her the truth. Or should I?”Knox stops mid-stride, his fist still raised, his whole body vibrating with the effort of not finishing what he started. Because Rafael just changed the game.My breath has

EMBER’S POV“Ember.” Queenie’s voice fractures. “I don’t — I don’t know what you’re talking about.”“You don’t?” I tilt my head and study her, the way her hands have started shaking, the way her eyes dart to Nathaniel before she can stop herself — the tell she’s never been able to control, the involuntary reflex of a woman who checks with her husband before deciding how to feel. “Really, Queenie? Because your face is doing that thing it does. That thing where you look to Nathaniel for permission before you decide what you’re allowed to say.”“That’s not — I’m not—”“The nervous energy all trip. The way you can’t hold my eyes for longer than three seconds. The way you flinch every single time someone mentions the council trial.” I’m walking toward her now, slowly, and she’s backing up, and there is something happening in my chest that is very calm and very cold and very, very finished with being careful. “I have been watching you for weeks, Queenie. Cataloguing every twitch, every guil

EMBER’S POVThe movement is so fast it barely registers as motion — in a blink, his hand crossed the space between them in a devastating arc that splits Nathaniel’s skin from temple to jaw in three deep parallel gouges, ripping out an eye with no remorse.Blood sprays across the wall in a bright fan, spattering the wood panelling in a pattern that will never fully come out, and before Nathaniel can even stagger Knox follows through with a downward slash that catches his shirt at the collar and rips it apart to the navel, fabric and skin splitting together, the chest under opening in three long shallow lines that bloom red and raw from collarbone to stomach.Queenie screams, and my own heart stops.Nathaniel hits the wall and slides, catching himself with one hand pressed to his ruined face and the other to his torn chest, blood coursing through his fingers from both wounds.Finally, the mask is gone — the composure, the blankness, the professional act he’s worn for as long as I’ve kno

EMBER’S POV“I hate to say it, but I told you so,” Rafael says softly. “He is gone, and he is never coming back.”I don’t move.My knees are in the snow and my hands are numb and the tears have frozen to tracks on my cheeks, and I am so far past the point of responding to Rafael Montenegro that he might as well be speaking to the mountains.He crouches beside me.The warmth of his body engulfs mine even through the cold, and I hate that — hate that he’s warm and alive and HERE when the person who should be here is thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic heading toward a country with a woman who knew him before I existed.“You’re going to get hypothermia.” His voice is reasonable, though tentative. “Come inside. I’ll make you something warm.”I stare at the empty helicopter pad. The wind has already started filling in the tracks Knox left in the snow. In an hour, there’ll be no evidence he was ever here at all.“Ember.” His hand settles on my shoulder. “You can hate me tomorrow, I prom