Semua Bab TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING: Bab 231 - Bab 240

KNOX’S POV“No.”“He raised you.”“He saved me.” Nathaniel’s voice is stripped to the bone. “I was eleven. Living in the drainage tunnels under the old industrial district. Eating whatever I could steal. He found me during one of his community rounds — the pack clinics he ran in the low-income districts. I had a fever that should have killed me, and he brought me home and treated me for three weeks, and when the fever broke, he didn’t send me back to the tunnels.” A pause. “He gave me a bed. He gave me books. He gave me a name on medical forms and a place at his table, and he never once made me feel like a burden.”I let that sit. This image of poor, sickly Nathaniel rearranges everything I thought I knew about him.“His name was Petrov,” Nathaniel says. “And your father killed him.”The air in the car vanishes. For a second, the words pierce straight through my chest — not because they’re an accusation, because they’re not. There’s no blame in the way he says it. His face gives not

KNOX’S POV“I’m not revealing his location while you’re holding a trigger that could end my reign.”“And I’m not surrendering my only leverage on the word of a man who is illegally detaining my chosen mate.”We stare at each other. Two men at an impasse built from identical materials — love and fear and the absolute unwillingness to blink first. In another life, I think I might have liked Logan. The sheer, obstinate, self-destructive devotion is something I understand at a molecular level, and under different circumstances — circumstances that don’t involve him threatening to expose the worst night of my life — I could almost respect it.“Gale is alive,” I say. “Unharmed. Being held in a location I control. I’m prepared to take you to him personally.”“After I give you the drive.”“After you disarm the trigger and tell me where the drive is stored.”“No.”“Logan.”“No.” He stands. The crate screeches against concrete. “I’ve been reasonable. I gave you forty-eight hours. I came alone

EMBER’S POVNobody moves.The six arrows point at the house, and Harrison stands before them with his one remaining arm raised, and the silence that follows his words is not the kind that invites a response.“Thirty seconds,” Harrison says. “Bring him out, or my men come in.”I back away from the window.My phone is on the kitchen counter where I left it beside the cold tea, and Queenie’s is in her jacket pocket, and Knox is an hour away at minimum doing whatever Knox is doing with Logan.Even if I could reach him right now, he would arrive to a house full of arrows and dead bodies.Calling Knox is not a plan that would work right now. Even by some miracle, we’d all be dead before he arrives.“Everyone away from the windows,” Maurice says, and there’s a quality in his voice I’ve never heard from him before. “When those arrows come, they’ll punch straight through the siding. This place is weathered and old, and I doubt it can do much to protect us against those reinforced arrows.”He g

EMBER’S POVI can see everything from where I’m pinned in the kitchen. The hallway is short — bathroom, bedroom, storage room at the end, the door hanging open.Maurice is inside the room. I can see his back, his body positioned between the doorway and where Gale is chained, and in his hand is a kitchen knife that he grabbed from the drawer on his way through.His hands are shaking so badly that the blade is catching the light in irregular flashes.Harrison reaches the doorway and stops. He looks past Maurice at Gale, who is pressed against the wall as far as his chains will allow, wild-eyed, tear-streaked, the pathetic desperation of a man who has just realised his father didn’t come here to rescue him.“There you are.” Harrison’s voice carries down the hallway to where I’m pinned, and the sound of it is the worst thing I have ever heard because it’s CALM. Conversational, almost. Like he’s greeting his son at a holiday dinner and not standing in a doorway with a loaded gun. “Look at y

KNOX’S POVNathaniel takes the corners so fast the tyres scream against the ice, and I don’t tell him to slow down because I can feel her.Without pictures or words, I feel her through the unnamed connection living between us. It’s a proto-bond, an immature thread that usually hums when she’s close and goes quiet when she’s safe.Right now, it is doing neither.Right now, it’s a siren inside my chest, a frequency of wrongness that gets louder with every mile, and my hands are shaking against my thighs.“Faster,” I say.The engine screams as we violently weave through traffic, pulling manoeuvres that would earn us a century’s worth of tickets.The first thing to appear is a black car. A sick feeling guts me the second I see it, because I know damn well it isn’t Ember.Then the crossbow bolts embedded in the trees lining the driveway are next, and my blood goes cold because I know those bolts.I know the fletching, and I know the broadheads, and I know the man who favours this particula