All Chapters of TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING: Chapter 251 - Chapter 260

270 Chapters

CHAPTER 248: DO I EXILE HIM?

EMBER’S POVI sit beside his bed. Knox sits beside me. His hand finds mine, and his thumb traces circles on my knuckles. The motion is slow, rhythmic, and grounding in a way that I need more than I’m willing to admit.In that room, I tell Knox everything. The arrows, the plan, Queenie going for the gun, the man who grabbed her, firing the shot, Harrison’s men breaching the house. Harrison walking past me like I was nothing.Maurice in the doorway. The speech. The knife. The gunshot. Gale dying chained to a pipe. Harrison’s last words. The trigger pull.I tell it flatly, in order, like I’m reading it off a list, because the emotions are too big to attach to the words right now, and the mechanical delivery is the only way I can get through the sequence without breaking again.Knox listens without interrupting. When I finish, the silence is the kind that absorbs rather than demands.“The flash drive is neutralised,” he says, and I can hear in his voice that he’s giving me something good

CHAPTER 249: A MILLION WHAT IFS

KNOX’S POVEmber sleeps for an hour in the hospital chair beside Maurice’s bed with her hand wrapped around his on the blanket and her face finally, mercifully slack in a way that tells me her body has overruled her brain and forced a shutdown.I watch her for a while. The rise and fall of her breathing, the way her fingers stay curled around Maurice’s even in sleep, the smudge of dried blood she missed on her jaw.She sleeps the way she does everything — completely, without half-measures, surrendered to it in a way that makes me want to build a wall around this room and post guards and let her stay here until her body decides it’s had enough rest, which, based on the last seventy-two hours, would be approximately next week.But the flash drive is still waiting, and every hour it exists is an hour I spend carrying a weight I’m ready to put down.I almost leave alone.I consider letting her sleep in that chair with Maurice’s hand in hers, knowing Queenie is curled up safely down the ha

CHAPTER 250: LEAST ROMANTIC ORIGIN STORY

KNOX’S POV“He won’t talk, Ember.”“What if we should have—”“No.” The word comes out harder than I intend. “No, we should not have. Logan is a man who just lost the person he loved, and I am not murdering him for being in the wrong room at the wrong time.”“What if James already knows? What if his guards felt the house shaking and they’ve already reported it and there’s a file somewhere with my name on it and—”“The guards were outside. They felt vibrations and saw structural damage. The official report says incendiary bolts. There is no file with your name on it because there is no evidence that anything beyond a conventional weapon was used in that house.” I reach across and take her hand because her fingers are starting to shake the way they do when the spiral is building momentum. “Ember. Look at me.”She looks.“I have spent years hiding what I am from people who would destroy me if they knew. I am very, very good at it. And I am going to be just as good at hiding what YOU are u

CHAPTER 251: MY RING ON YOUR FINGER

KNOX’S POVI press my lips to her knuckles again because once wasn’t enough.“So no, I’m not going to stop loving you when life gets easier. I’m going to love you when it’s boring and quiet, and nothing is on fire, and I’m going to love you when you’re annoyed with me because I’ve left my shoes in the hallway AGAIN, and I’m going to love you on Tuesday nights on the couch when neither of us has anything to say and the silence is just silence and not a crisis. I’m going to love you in every version of our life that exists, including the ones where absolutely nothing interesting is happening, and you’re going to get sick of hearing it, and I’m going to say it anyway.”She doesn’t respond immediately.Her mouth opens and closes and opens again, and nothing comes out, which is a first for a woman who has had a comeback for everything I’ve thrown at her since the day we met.Her eyes are filling, and her chin is doing the trembling thing she hates because she thinks it makes her look weak.

CHAPTER 252: LET’S KILL IT

KNOX’S POVI kiss her standing on the shoulder of a dark highway in Alaska with her legs around my waist and the stars above us and the cold biting every inch of exposed skin and neither of us caring because the heat between us has always been enough.And it is enough now, and it will be enough tomorrow and next week and next year and for every year after that until I run out of years.When we break apart, she’s breathless, and her cheeks are flushed, and her eyes are bright and alive in a way that has nothing to do with silver or Sapphire and everything to do with being a woman who just said yes to a man she loves on a road in the middle of nowhere.“Take me to the flash drive,” she says. “I want to burn it as your fiancée. It’ll feel better.”“Everything feels better as my fiancée.”“Don’t push it.”I carry her back to the car because the ground is still frozen and she’s still in hospital socks.I set her in the passenger seat and her feet go immediately back on the dashboard and th

CHAPTER 253: SETTING IT ALL ON FIRE

KNOX’S POVThe dead man’s trigger first. I enter Logan’s code into the server interface — the alphanumeric sequence, exactly as he recited it in the storage room with that smile I still can’t decode.The system prompts for confirmation. I confirm. The screen flashes once, a progress bar runs, and then a single line of text:DISTRIBUTION PROTOCOL DEACTIVATED. TRIGGER OFFLINE.The kill switch is dead.Ember exhales beside me. I didn’t realise she’d been holding her breath.I pull out the diagnostic device Nathaniel gave me.Military-grade, designed for intelligence operations — it scans for duplication signatures, verifies whether data has been copied or transferred to external devices, and confirms whether the physical drive is the original or a clone.I plug it in, and the scan takes four minutes while Ember stands beside me with her arms crossed, tracking the progress bar with sharp, untrusting focus.She has been burned by half-measures before, and she refuses to look away until it

CHAPTER 254: HONORING THEM

EMBER’S POVThe fire is still burning when Knox says it.He’s staring into the flames with an expression I haven’t seen before, and the orange light is catching the planes of his handsome face, making the shadows under his eyes look like bruises and the bruises look like shadows.Five seconds.That’s how long I played the footage before I slammed the laptop shut, and those five seconds are still living inside my skull like an unwanted tenant.The ballroom. The golden lighting. The laughter of people who had minutes left to live and didn’t know it.And then the sound — the sound that came from the far corner of the frame, the thing that was Knox and wasn’t Knox, the guttural growl that belongs in a nightmare.I closed it before I saw what he became. But I heard the beginning of what he did, and the beginning was enough.The man beside me, holding my hand, watching a fire consume the evidence of his worst night, this man is not that sound. This man is not that night.I need to believe t

CHAPTER 255: KISSING AND TALKING

EMBER’S POVThe hot spring is exactly where the sign said it would be — a natural thermal pool set into a rocky clearing off the highway, steam rising from the surface into the frozen air, the water glowing faintly blue-green from the mineral content.It’s deserted because it’s two in the morning and sane people are sleeping, and we are not sane people and have not been sane people for some time.I strip off Knox’s jacket and the borrowed hospital scrubs and walk into the water in my underwear, and the sound I make when the heat hits my body is embarrassing and involuntary, and I don’t care.The warmth wraps around my legs and my hips and my waist and crawls up my ribs, and every muscle I’ve been clenching since the first arrow hit Maurice’s wall releases simultaneously.My body has been holding its breath for twelve hours, and this is the exhale.Knox follows me in. I watch the dark water rise over the heavy, carved muscle of his chest, sliding down the hard ridges of his abs to swal

CHAPTER 256: COUNT DOWN

EMBER’S POVI don’t know why.It’s childish and ridiculous and completely inappropriate given the emotional weight of the last three hours, but his face is too serious and too beautiful and too close, and my body is full of adrenaline that has nowhere to go and the water is RIGHT THERE.The splash catches him square in the face. He blinks. Water dripping from his eyelashes. His expression cycling from shock to disbelief to something dangerous.“Did you just—”I splash him again.“Ember.”“Yes?”“You are aware that I am a Lycan King and you just threw water in my face.”“I’m aware. Your face was too dry. I fixed it. You’re welcome.”His eyes narrow, and the gold flares behind the blue, and I have approximately half a second to register that I’ve made a tactical error before his good arm hooks around my waist and YANKS, and I go under with a shriek that becomes bubbles.I surface gasping and laughing, and he’s grinning — actually grinning, the rare, full, unguarded version that uses his

CHAPTER 257: SIXTY SECONDS

EMBER’S POVMy stomach drops, flips, and catches fire simultaneously.I KNOW those words.I know them in my body before my brain catches up, and the memory hits me with the force of a freight train.The hotel room, the black lace, the garter belt I’d never worn before, Knox on his knees between my legs with the styling team locked on the other side of the door and my back against the wall and the count falling apart in my mouth because his tongue was doing things that made numbers feel like a foreign language.I was a different woman then. Terrified, exhilarated, wearing borrowed confidence and someone else’s lingerie.I counted down from sixty and didn’t make it past twenty-six.“You cannot be serious right now.”“I’ve never lost this game.” His thumb is tracing circles on my hip under the water, and the casual, distracted quality of the motion contrasts violently with the intensity in his eyes. “Flawless record.”“We’ve played it ONCE, Knox. One time does not constitute a record.”“

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