All Chapters of TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING: Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

EMBER’S POVThree polite rapt on the wood.“Ember.” Rafael’s voice through the bedroom door, warm and concerned, exactly calibrated. “You haven’t eaten all day. I had the kitchen prepare something light — soup, bread. I’ll leave it outside your door. You don’t have to see me. Just eat.”I don’t answer. The clink of a tray on the floor is followed by his footsteps retreating.I don’t touch the tray.The second knock comes mid-afternoon. Softer, almost tentative.“I understand you’re angry, and I accept that. You have every reason.” A pause. A sigh that sounds almost frustrated. “But starving yourself in a locked room isn’t going to bring him back, Ember. It’s not going to undo what happened. Come out. Even just for air. I’ll keep my distance.”He waits three full minutes. I count. Then he leaves.The third knock comes at sunset. The softness is gone.“Ember, this is ridiculous.” His voice has dropped the warmth entirely, replaced by something clipped and strained. “Over twelve hours. Bl

KNOX’S POVThe thing about self-destruction is that it requires commitment. You can’t half-arse it.You can’t run toward the fire and then flinch at the heat — you have to walk in and let it take you, and you have to do it with enough conviction that the people watching think it was intentional.A choice. A power move.The Lycan King, choosing Switzerland with the easy nonchalance of a man who has somewhere important to be, rather than the truth, which is that I strapped myself into a metal tube hurtling toward the one place on earth that could finish the job Ember started this morning.Because I am a coward, and between confronting the truth of her words and running, I choose running.I always choose running.Rayana is across the aisle and she hasn’t spoken in two hours, which is a record for a woman who once talked through an entire root canal.She’s curled in the leather seat with a blanket pulled up to her chin and her face turned toward the window, and in the cabin light she look

KNOX’S POV“I’m fine, Mathilde.”“You were always a terrible liar.” Her eyes drift toward the cemetery where Rayana is kneeling at her mother’s grave, whispering things and possibly sobbing.Mathilde’s whole face changes, lighting up with pure delight.“Is that — oh my. Is that your lady friend from years back? Rayana?” She clasps her hands together. “I can’t believe it. Look at the two of you, two mischievous peas as always. Your mothers would be beside themselves.”“Rayana and I aren’t together,” I say, and the correction lands heavier than it should. “We’re just here for the graves. We won’t be staying long.”Mathilde’s face falls — a quick, genuine sadness that she doesn’t bother to hide.“Oh. Well. That’s a shame. Katherine and Beatrice would have loved that, you know. They had it all planned from the time you two were in nappies.” She sighs. “But I always told them — always told Katherine, always told Beatrice, rest her soul — you two would eventually decide for yourselves who y

KNOX’S POVMy jaw locks so tight something in my temple pops and my eyes burn with a heat that has nowhere to go because I haven’t cried since I was a child in this hallway and I’m not going to start now.I’m NOT, I refuse to give this house the satisfaction of—Choose to stay.She couldn’t. She wrote the words and she couldn’t follow them.She told me to stay whole and she broke herself instead, and I’ve spent my entire life proving that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree because what did I do this morning?What did I do when the pain got bad enough, when Ember’s words hit the places that were already bleeding, when the room closed in and the only options were stay and feel it or run and numb it?I ran. I said “wouldn’t think of it” and I walked out and I flew to Switzerland.I left her standing in the snow screaming my name, and my mother is asking me from beyond the grave to do the one thing she couldn’t do and the one thing I have never once in my life been able to do, which

KNOX’S POV“I know you’ve been told I’m terminal and I know you think that means years, maybe, or months at least, because that’s what terminal sounds like from the outside — a long, slow, dignified decline with time to prepare.” She pulls her arms tighter around herself and I can see her hands shaking and the grey of her skin and the thinness of her wrists and the blood she coughed up on the plane and all of it rearranges itself into a picture I should have read hours ago. Days ago. “I have two weeks. Maybe less. The herbs that have been keeping me upright are failing. Dr. Patel told me at the summit when you left with Ember — the updated scans, the bloodwork, all of it — and I was sitting in the corridor afterwards crying like an idiot when Rafael found me.”Her words land and rearrange everything I thought I understood about the woman sitting beside me. Six months — that’s what she told everyone. Six months at most.Enough time to plan, to prepare, to say goodbyes at a reasonable p